“My Body Stopped Speaking to Me”

Courtesy of Longreads, Andrew Corsello’s tour de force 1995 GQ piece about experiencing near-fatal liver failure is now available for online consumption, and I can’t remember the last time I read illness (“I’ve felt smacked around, cooked in the skin. Odd things ache, like the ocular cords — as if the eyeballs have been pulled out and snapped back”) or bodily sensation rendered so vividly:

Later, lying in a hospital bed waiting to die, I will conjure this flexing of my youth. Yet the fog, the field, the man, won’t seem as vivid as things happening beneath the skin. I will recall the roar of lungs, heart and rushing blood, amplified in my head the way it is underwater in a swimming pool. That is my body speaking to me: One of the superstitions I’ve retained from childhood is that objects — including parts of the body — are imbued with spirit, and that I should treat them as I treat people and animals. At 18, I am a person who actually talks to his body, who after crossing a finish line, seeks a quiet place to congratulate and thank his legs. It’s my childhood desire to beat death — to make my body a blood brother so that it can never, will never, turn on me.

For Corsello, what begins as a slight enzyme abnormality and a sensation of dizzy dryness on a Colorado hike quickly escalates into full-on organ failure. “Where alanine aminotransferase (ALT) — an enzyme released by damaged liver cells — should stay below forty units per liter, mine’s at 1,990,” he writes. Hearing “not much time” from his doctor, he dazedly thinks about how his mom will have to fly into town and stay at his untidy apartment; with his body deteriorating by the minute, he spends two hours with Pine-Sol and bleach, getting to the hospital only at this point:

“Haven’t you looked in the mirror?” he asks, leading me to an examining room. “Look.” The whites of my eyes are egg-yolk yellow. How has this gone unnoticed? The look is bizarre but not entirely unappealing — I appear lupine and clever. But when I take a step back to view the rest of my face, I see that the jaundice has given my skin a sallow translucence, like the bruising on an old pear. “Jesus,” I say, “What’s that?”

…Vertigo, blurred vision, violent nausea and skin as yellow as a summer squash. I’m peeing black and crapping white: Bilirubin, normally passed from the liver to the bowel — where it gives color to stool — is leaking into the kidneys. I smell weird. There is a biopsy — a metal claw shot between the ribs that tears off a chunk of liver and brings it to the surface. “Show me,” I say, taking the glass jar from the doctor’s hand. The little brown tatter floats in its solution like a tequila worm.

The rest of his ordeal continues like this, unflinching and strangely gorgeous and pared down to a memorable weekend read.