There’s a version of this story that gets cleaned up for public consumption. The one where everything builds toward a redemptive arc, the hard parts get softened, and you walk away feeling inspired in a comfortable way.
That’s not this.
My brother Troy and I are Gen X, born eleven months apart, raised in different households in different states, and we both ended up needing a new liver. The odds of that are somewhere between improbable and absurd. But here we are.
What follows is the honest version of how it went in our YouTube video.
Troy’s Side
Troy’s story started with his eyes turning the color of Fireball whiskey. He didn’t connect it at first — the itching that kept him up at night, the orange tint that a coworker noticed before he did. He went to the doctor. They sent him to the lab for blood work. He walked out without getting it drawn.
That was the beginning of a pattern that anyone who’s been in that particular kind of denial will recognize immediately.
The bilirubin kept building. He’d drive over an hour to get drained — sometimes 22 liters at a time — then be leaking through the drain site before he got home. He kept drinking through most of it. His kids came out and stayed with him for four months. He stopped drinking while they were there, started feeling like maybe he was turning a corner. They went back to their lives in Oregon. He started again.
He ended up in a tavern where people knew exactly what was going on and told him he shouldn’t be drinking. His answer was essentially: mind your business. That’s not a character flaw — that’s what end-stage liver disease looks like from the inside. Your judgment is compromised, your brain is filling with ammonia, and the thing that’s killing you is also the thing your nervous system has reorganized itself around.
He describes that period as giving up. Lying on the couch, surprised when he woke up each morning. His MELD score — the number that determines transplant eligibility — wasn’t high enough yet for the list. So he waited, increasingly alone, increasingly confused, adding cocaine and other things to the mix because people around him thought it might help him get off the alcohol. It didn’t.
The hepatic encephalopathy — what we call HE — hit him at work. Completely sober, slurring his words, failing a breathalyzer he passed because there was nothing in his system. Just a brain that couldn’t process toxins correctly. That’s what it looks like from the outside: drunk. What it feels like from the inside is fog you can’t think your way out of.
He eventually got listed. He got his transplant. He’s here.
My Side
Mine took almost a decade longer to resolve and had more moving parts.
The likely origin point is the late 1980s in the Army — intravenous drug use that was common enough in infantry units running on no sleep and impossible operational tempos. Hepatitis C. I wouldn’t find out until 2017 when the VA finally tested me.
The first real collapse was Valentine’s Day, 2010. I fell down a flight of stairs, came to with doctors around me, and was told I had stage 4 liver failure. The doctor gave me six months to three years.
I looked at him and said: I don’t buy your myth of death.
I walked out of the hospital the next morning and didn’t go back to traditional medicine for seven years. I went into shamanic healing, alternative practice, eventually became a vegan because a study out of Australia suggested animal protein accelerated the encephalopathy. I capped myself at 20 grams of protein a day. Go over it and I was gone — not drunk, not tired, just gone. Synapses misfiring. Talking about the microwave and calling it a mushroom, then a marshmallow, before finally landing on the right word. Sitting under a fig tree I’d named Newton and talking to it for most of 2013.
I got invited into Recovery Café in Athens, Georgia to speak to a recovery group about what it’s like when a doctor tells you you’re dying and you refuse to accept it. I stayed. Got certifications. Became a counselor. Meanwhile I was driving the bypass some days just gripping the steering wheel with everything I had, not because the car was out of control, but because my brain kept slipping sideways and I had to anchor to something physical to stay in the lane.
In 2017 a friend asked if I’d ever thought about going to the VA. I hadn’t thought about the Army since I left in 1988. I went. They found the Hepatitis C immediately, wondered why nobody had caught it. Two months later they called again: two tumors. I got the news on the highway on the way to see Dead & Company with my daughter. I didn’t say anything until we got home.
I posted it on Facebook as good news. Because a cancer diagnosis when you have end-stage liver disease is actually good news — it spikes the MELD score.
I went through three clinical trials at the Pittsburgh VA. I got put on the transplant list. I had one false start — flew up on a Lear jet from rural Georgia in the middle of the night, got to Pittsburgh, and the surgeon told me the liver wasn’t good enough for someone my age and condition. I flew home commercially.
January 2nd, 2019. Phone rings. We have a liver. Do you still want it?
The power was out in Athens from a storm. The car they sent couldn’t get through. I took an Uber to the airfield, talked to the sheriff’s department on the phone, got walked out onto a tarmac in the rain by a deputy while the airport lights came on for a Lear jet with nobody in the tower. The pilot landed, walked over, and told me he needed to use the bathroom before we took off.
That’s the actual texture of the night I got my liver.
January 3rd, 2019. I woke up on the other side of it.
What We Want You to Take From This
We’re not presenting this as a triumph narrative. We’re not saying we did it right. Troy didn’t ask for advice and neither did I — we both went our own way through it, which is probably the most Gen X thing about the whole story.
What we are saying is that if you’re somewhere in this process right now — pre-diagnosis, post-diagnosis, on the list, waiting — the only thing we know for certain is that hope is not optional. It’s not a soft word. It’s a load-bearing structure.
Don’t give it up.
You are your own greatest asset. That sounds like something printed on a motivational poster, and we’d normally be the first to mock that kind of thing. But it’s the truest thing we know how to say about this particular road.
Listen to your doctors. Listen to the people around you who actually know your situation. Don’t necessarily do it the way we did it. But don’t stop moving forward.
Watch the Full Episode
This is the compilation of our earliest videos — remastered audio, original content. It includes both Troy’s account and mine in full. If you’re pre-transplant, you might want to stop at a certain point and come back to the rest later. We flag it in the video.
If you’ve been through a transplant, are heading toward one, or are somewhere in between — drop a comment. We want to hear from you.
Steve R. Patterson is a liver transplant and cancer survivor, U.S. Army veteran, counselor, author, and host of the Free Will Burning Podcast. His book This Is How It Feels to Heal is available on Amazon. Find more at stevepatterson.online.