I’m 45, and I rarely thought about having a serious illness before my liver issues. I’ve known for a long time that something will eventually get me, but I didn’t see anything affecting me in the near future. My father lived to 42, and died of a brain tumor. But that wasn’t genetic. My mom died about two years ago, but that was from ALS, and not the type that is passed on genetically. The diseases my parents were flukes—most people in my family live pretty long lives if they take care of themselves even the slightest amount, living into their 80s or 90s. So I was still in good shape at my age, and had another few decades before I had to worry about anything. I’m a vegetarian, don’t eat junk, play golf and tennis, and am in pretty good shape.

I live in Los Angeles, and last fall my husband and I were renting a house in the town where I grew up, Santa Barbara, about an hour and a half north of the city. My mom had died several months earlier, and I was processing the loss and spending some time seeing friends and family in the town where I grew up. I spent a lot of time by myself at the rental house—me and the two cats—since my husband was in L.A. on weekdays. I was working on several projects, so I was keeping busy and generally having a nice time there.

As we got further into fall I started to feel unwell. It was hard to place—for a while I thought maybe it was a stomach bug. I felt kind of rumbly, like I had a rock in my stomach, and was often running to use the bathroom. My anxiety had also kicked up after a quiet period of six months or so. We had sold my mom’s house, the estate work I had been doing as executor of my mom’s estate had quieted down, and I had been feeling better for a while. But now I had very bad social anxiety, and felt like I would have to throw up around people I’d see–gagging and throwing up are my mechanisms of flight in the fight or flight scenario. I started seeing my therapist over the computer again after a break, and she recommended I go on Lexapro, which I did.

I was spending a lot of time lying in bed, reading or watching TV because I didn’t feel well enough to walk around or even go for drives in town. I started having food and groceries delivered to the house. My anxiety started easing up over the course of a month as the drugs started to work, but my stomach still felt rotten.

Over the course of about three days I became jaundiced. The skin on my face, the whites of my eyes, and under my tongue turned yellow. I barely noticed it—the lights in the house were all soft, yellow lights, and in the unusually rainy days of winter all we saw all day was soft, yellow light.