When I was 21 years old (5 years ago now) I went to the emergency room because the pain in the upper right quadrant of my torso was unbearable after eating. Bada bing bada boom, 12 tumors chilling on my liver. The biggest was 3 by 4 inches on the left lobe, and was pushing against my stomach as food was doing its food thing. I was sent to a liver specialist who said, "I'm not even going to bother with putting you through anymore testing. I'm sending you to the head of transplantation surgery at UC Health."

My doctor and soon to be surgeon was thee dude for this kind of thing. Almost every doctor I've mentioned his name to knows who he is, so I felt like I was in good hands.

Alas, the surgery he wanted to preform that was supposed to only take an hour, took nearly 10. I went back into the OR at 7:00AM and my parents didn't get to speak with my doctor until around 4:00PM. Laproscopic was the goal, but they ended up essentially having to preform a c section to remove the tumor. (I was cut open hip to hip)

I was told by my doctor that I was not waking up post op. They had to administer more than one dose of Narcan to get me to wake up.

I had to recover while waiting for the results of the biopsy of the tumor. I didn't know if they were cancerous or not. Weeks passed, results in. Benign.

I was, to say the least, over the moon. My birthday was soon and I wanted to celebrate being able to just be alive because wow, Hepatic Adenomatosis has the highest rate of becoming cancer in the long term.

My dad asked me "Why are you having a party for your birthday? You're turning 22." As if the age itself was explanation enough.

"That's precisely why" is all I could think of to say at the time.