In 2018 I was diagnosed with end-stage liver disease.

In December 2018 I went into the hospital in liver failure. Advanced liver disease, alcohol-associated liver disease (ALD), sepsis, and cirrhosis were all on my chart, and what I had was called end-stage liver disease (ESLD) at the time. Doctors prepared my mother for the worst.

Alcohol is what brought me there. A doctor told me that one more sip would kill me. I never had another sip.

However you got here. Alcohol, like me. Years of high sugar and ultra-processed food. An autoimmune disease. Something nobody has ever been able to explain.

This is a place for you.

I am writing this to you from my kitchen, and from this new life I have been given.

I did not find a cure. I still have cirrhosis. What I found was that the daily choices in front of me mattered more than I understood at the time.

I kept learning, kept experimenting, kept moving forward. My MELD score went from 28 to 7. Six is as low as that scale goes, and nobody told me that. I kept waiting for it to keep dropping. I never needed a transplant.

Not long ago my gastroenterologist told me that if he passed me on the street, he would not think I had cirrhosis. He would not think I had liver disease at all. At my sickest I had the edema, the ascites, the yellow eyes, the thinning hair, the easy bruising, the itching. All of it. That may be the nicest thing a doctor has ever said to me.

I cannot promise you my road. Nobody can promise anybody that. But I can tell you I was told there was no hope, and that the medicine was only there to keep me comfortable. That was not true, and it was not the end of my story.

I never believed I was going to die. That was not my own strength. It was a gift from GOD, and HE gave me the knowing while four doctors told me otherwise.

What I could not look up

When I was diagnosed I did what you have probably already done. I typed my questions into a search bar and read whatever came back.

A lot of what I needed was not there. I went looking anyway, everywhere, watching videos that were not even about cirrhosis because I knew there might be one nugget buried in them that would matter for us. There is much more out there now about fatty liver disease, and that is a good thing. But we have cirrhosis. That is a different conversation, and there is still nowhere near enough of it.

Years of notes. Post-its. Saved videos. Things I wrote down at the time because I did not want to lose them. I am putting all of it into Embrobi.

What you’ll find here

Taking the salt out is the hard part. It was never the point. The point is giving this body the food it was designed to receive. The sodium I do get comes from the food itself now. Eggs. Fish. Chicken. Things GOD made.

Food that actually tastes like something. When the doctor told me to take salt out completely, I was devastated. I thought that was the end of food being good. It was not. It was the beginning of learning what food could taste like when I stopped reaching for the salt shaker and started reaching for everything else.

Real food, not “low sodium” food. I do not want you thinking you can walk in and pull something off a shelf because the front of the box says the right words. A lot of that is garbage. It is full of preservatives that are not good for your gut and not good for a liver with cirrhosis, and the advertising is built to hook you. So this takes thought.

Food for the little army inside you. I do not only eat for me. I eat for the microbes in my gut, because when I feed them what they actually want, they get to work on my behalf. Building up a good colony and then feeding it well is one of the quiet things that changed the most for me, and it is far more delicious than it sounds.

The grocery store, made walkable. Plenty of people will teach you to shop. Almost nobody teaches you to shop with cirrhosis. And once you know what you are looking for, the store you have always gone to turns into a different place, quieter and simpler and full of things you have walked past for years.

Honest research, brought down to earth. I follow this research closely because it is my life. When I find something worth knowing, I bring it to you plainly, including what is still early and what we do not know yet.

Hope that holds up. I am not going to pretend this is easy. It is not. But I have lived what happens when you keep going anyway, and I would like you to see it too.

It comes down to a simple and beautiful thing. The clean food GOD made for us.

Come along with me

Recipes, what I am learning, every new exciting thing I find, and the moment the YouTube channel goes live, the community opens, or the book is ready. I would love to have YOU here for it.

I am not a doctor. I am a patient who has walked this road and paid close attention, and I share what I have learned. Please work alongside your own healthcare team, always.

And be a real part of that team. Ask what a medication is for and how long you should be on it. Ask what else it affects. Ask for the labs and the scans that would show you where you actually are, and ask what the numbers mean. Write things down between visits, because nobody sees your days except you.

I say that because I did not do it in the beginning. I was on a steroid for sixteen months that nobody reassessed, and it cost me my bones. So take what you find here to your team, and ask them about it. It is your body, and you are the one who is with it all day.

My prayer is that you find something here that makes tomorrow a little easier, and that you come to know how deeply GOD loves YOU.

Prayers, blessings and broccoli sprouts, 💛✝️🥦🤗
Emily

If you are ready for the practical part, this is where I would start you.