A few days before Christmas my older sister and her two kids came to visit from up north. The night she stayed with me she launched into me after her kids went to bed: “You need to see a doctor! Right away!” I had no idea what she was talking about. If she had said, “You’re yellow!” I might have heard her message, but I didn’t understand why she was so persistent. I figured she was worried because I’d lost some weight, and for some reason I never thought to ask why she was upset.

The next day she drove about a half hour south to stay with my younger sister, and at some point on her way there she called a good friend of mine, a doctor, and asked him to check on me. He texted me and asked if he could come by the house. I said I was fine, and told him not to bother, and that I would see a doctor that week, but he said he would be at the house in 10 minutes. He showed up, not fully able to see what my sister was talking about in the low lighting in the house, but used the flashlight on his phone to examine me. “Not good,” he said. “You’re jaundiced. It could be something bad, or something worse. You need to go to the ER right away.” We talked a bit, and figured out a good time to go to the ER. He works there, so he knew the worst times to go. I knew I didn’t want to spend all day and into the night at the ER, so going on Christmas Eve didn’t seem like the best time to go. I had taken my mom there a couple of times when she was sick, and seven hours had been our shortest visit. I was hoping to be prescribed some medicine and be sent home.We decided I would wait one day and go in the morning the day after Christmas.

That morning we showed up around 10:00 a.m. and got into a room pretty quickly. The nurse took some blood and we waited. My doctor friend was working that day and came to check on me and my husband. My ER doctor came in when my friend was there and we were all given the news that my bilirubin number was very high, and that was a problem. This meant that there was something serious going on with my liver. I hadn’t been drinking anything alcoholic since my friend advised against it a couple days before. At some point my stomach started to turn again, and I said I thought I might throw up. The doctor had a plastic bag for me right away, and what I threw up was a lot of blood. I was disturbed, and my friend was suddenly trying making notes in my chart. They decided it was time to admit me to the hospital.