Hepatic Adenomas - Ruptured And Almost Bled To Death.

[Altair]

Where do I start. For those of you who remember, I was diagnosed with multiple hepatic adenomas few years back.

I did not come off any significant amount off time to see much of a difference in terms of them regressing or anything.

No, instead I did the most absolute idiotic thing possible and kept using.
Down the road I added 4iu of serostim/genotropin pens and 10iu humalog pre and post.

Please read what end up happening,

August 2018 -

I was on my way home from the gym, and suddenly felt this feeling like I pulled a rib or something. I played it off but it wasn’t getting any better.

I get home and tell my wife I’m gonna go lay down for a bit I wasn’t feeling too great and that I’m feeling this discomfort near my liver region.

Knowing that I had these adenomas that’s exactly where my mind went.
Well I wasn’t getting any better and now was getting fever/chills.
I tell my wife let’s go to the ER we can’t risk this.

We called an Uber and on the way there I just kept felling worse but not much pain yet.

I get checked in and the nurse came with an ultrasound machine to scan the liver. She said she couldn’t spot any bleeding so then they took me in for a ct scan.

Out of nowhere I get one of the most painful sharp pain like someone was stabbing my liver, my wife is about to faint from seeing me like that and I’m yelling to the nurse somethings happening right now inside my liver and to do something.

Then this Doctor came to tell me that the ct scan shows one of the adenomas bleeding but we should wait it out hoping it will stop by itself.

Anyhow I was pretty much out of it from either the sedation or the blood loss don’t remember much.
This was 11pm mind you.

Now it’s 9am and two blood transfusions after, they decided to take me in for surgery to embolize the bleeding tumor through an artery in my groin. That was a success, but they took way to long to take action in fact I over heard one of the main Doctors say “this guy should’ve been embolized yesterday!”

Unfortunately though I had 4-5 liters of blood pooling in my abdomen from all the bleeding. We tried to wait it out hoping the body would take care of it but no.
Was getting worse, the had to insert an NG tube up my nose down to my stomach so it could drain my stomach content.
That was one of the most uncomfortable feeling a human being can experience.

My bowels where pretty much obstructed. Two weeks past and I haven’t ate or drank anything. In fact I started vomiting my own feces from my mouth, things started to get even worse so we decided it was best to go in for surgery.
I had a laparotomy done, they made an incision in my abdomen to drain and suction all the blood.
Surgery was a success.
3 weeks of no food/liquids, a ton of pain killers, a ton of antibiotics and heparin shots, here I was. From my biggest/strongest 255lbs to 200lbs. So weak I struggled doing something as basic as washing my hands.

6 months post op I’m doing relatively ok. Still have multiple adenomas, some of them are regressing but it looks I’ll be needing more surgery down the road.
Plan is resecting the few bigger ones and ablating the rest with Radiofrequency Ablation. Have a great team of Doctors next to me. Doing our next absolute best to avoid a liver transplant.
Hormonally I’ve been off everything since then with my test levels extremely low at 62. I’m actually starting Doctor prescribed trt next week.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to read, I’m truly grateful.

 

[thethinker48]

Thanks for sharing

Hope this adds as a good reminder on proper estrogen management and the bad luck of the draw some of us can get playing this game.

Edit: Hope you recover from this, and stay away from gear use. More to life than big muscles; you know this as you’ve come close to bleeding to death as a consequence.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Thaistick]

Dammit man that's a rough story. Hope people are paying attention.

 

[maldorf]

Thank you for coming on here and sharing your story

Your story is very similar to mine, liver instead of heart. I think you will be able to live a perfectly normal life though once this is all over. I sure hope you can avoid a transplant. I know someday I will need a heart transplant and that scares the shit out of me. Not ready to die young.

Hang in there. This is a big life changing event. I am still dealing with the decisions I made in bodybuilding and it has been almost 11 years since my heart attack, going to deal with it the rest of my life. Hopefully your trouble will just be a distant memory a year or two from now.

Oh, and doesn't Heparin suck! Once they did the heart cath and went through my legs they turned black and blue from my foot all the way up to my groin. My privates were the color of an 8 ball! Took about a whole month for all the color to go away.

 

[danieltx]

A good lesson for us all. We NEED time off to best manage our health.

Altair, respect for sharing your story and I hope your health continues to improve.

 

[Joltan]

What caused them?

 

[maldorf]

What caused them?

Good question. Im wondering if usage of a lot of orals.

 

[Joltan]

Found this on pubmed:

There seems not to be a strong association with estrogen or anabolic steroid use [Chiche et al. 2000; Grazioli et al. 2000]. However, there is a strong association with glycogen storage disease [Chiche et al. 2000; Frulio et al. 2014].



https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5076773/

 

[Altair]

Your story is very similar to mine, liver instead of heart. I think you will be able to live a perfectly normal life though once this is all over. I sure hope you can avoid a transplant. I know someday I will need a heart transplant and that scares the shit out of me. Not ready to die young.

Hang in there. This is a big life changing event. I am still dealing with the decisions I made in bodybuilding and it has been almost 11 years since my heart attack, going to deal with it the rest of my life. Hopefully your trouble will just be a distant memory a year or two from now.

Oh, and doesn't Heparin suck! Once they did the heart cath and went through my legs they turned black and blue from my foot all the way up to my groin. My privates were the color of an 8 ball! Took about a whole month for all the color to go away.

Thank you my friend, a transplant is a scary thought. All those immunosuppressants and the fact that you might need a second one down the road. Honestly didn’t get any adverse reaction from the heparin shots but man that ng tube sucked big time I hated every second of it!

 

[Altair]

I was never big on orals, I only used them once anadrol and anavar for 5-6 months and that was it.

My use was basically high test 1.5-2g and nandrolone or tren 700mg-1g, sometimes eq in there too.
My ai’s where probably bunk in the beginning (tested at 400 estradiol) but for the past two years I used both pharma arimidex and aromasin.
I only “cruised” once or twice in my whole bodybuilding career, that was very stupid.

I take fully the blame for this, I was way too stubborn and into my goals to listen to anyone, even myself.

Mind you guys this happened to me at 24, I started AAS at 18. It didn’t take exactly a lifetime for this to happen.

 

[Delt123]

That's very young man.

Hope all is well now

 

[Deleted member 121863]

I was never big on orals, I only used them once anadrol and anavar for 5-6 months and that was it.

This might be one of this biggest myths ever, that only orals damage your liver! Where do you think those 2-3g/wk of cholesterol based, injectable hormones are broken down?? THE LIVER!!

 

[maldorf]

I was never big on orals, I only used them once anadrol and anavar for 5-6 months and that was it.

My use was basically high test 1.5-2g and nandrolone or tren 700mg-1g, sometimes eq in there too.
My ai’s where probably bunk in the beginning (tested at 400 estradiol) but for the past two years I used both pharma arimidex and aromasin.
I only “cruised” once or twice in my whole bodybuilding career, that was very stupid.

I take fully the blame for this, I was way too stubborn and into my goals to listen to anyone, even myself.

Mind you guys this happened to me at 24, I started AAS at 18. It didn’t take exactly a lifetime for this to happen.

Reminds me of what happened to Dallas Mccarver, dead at 26 years old. I was only 38 when I had my big heart attack. I started steroids at about the age of 27, so I was on them for about 11 years.

 

[sazo75]

Did the docs know about the AAS use, and did they contribute it to this or something else?

 

[Altair]

Did the docs know about the AAS use, and did they contribute it to this or something else?

Doctors definitely knew since the beginning when I was diagnosed.
There’s probably some kind of genetic component to it too, but can’t see it being something other than the AAS.

On a side note I also just got diagnosed with Celiac Disease few weeks ago. I wonder if there would be any correlation but I really doubt it.

Also should mention that I had two of the bigger adenomas biopsied, which showed beta catenin mutation. In other words the chance of these turning malignant in the future is much higher.

 

[gotgame]

Doctors definitely knew since the beginning when I was diagnosed.
There’s probably some kind of genetic component to it too, but can’t see it being something other than the AAS.

On a side note I also just got diagnosed with Celiac Disease few weeks ago. I wonder if there would be any correlation but I really doubt it.

Also should mention that I had two of the bigger adenomas biopsied, which showed beta catenin mutation. In other words the chance of these turning malignant in the future is much higher.

I am very sorry to hear this. I really am. I knew a few bbers with i was in nyc and had a few die, one on the IR table from a ruptured adenoma.

Becareful with the beta catenin mutation..there was a member here about 2-3 years ago who had a lot of HCC and had a liver transplant and subsequently died. I spoke with him at length and i remembe the moderators here were good enough to change is username and wipe his old posts because there was a small risk of it hindering his chances for a liver transplant which he wound up getting.

I dont know what do say.. you sent me a PM and id never say " i told you so". I wish everyone well and AAS i firmly believe can be used safely. There are risks...its not just "genetics" but there are ways to significantly reduce those risks.

Some people just dont care or dont want to believe about liver issues... maybe my view are skewed because ive seen all the issues.

All i can suggest i suppose is for other people to make sure estrogen is in check, use reasonable doses, and limit very androgenic things like tren. Its not only estrogen.

 

[Swifto]

No doubt your AAS use accelerated or caused your issue. Grams of AAS for years is going to catch up eventually. All for a plastic trophy.

I wish you the best sir

 

[Altair]

I am very sorry to hear this. I really am. I knew a few bbers with i was in nyc and had a few die, one on the IR table from a ruptured adenoma.

Becareful with the beta catenin mutation..there was a member here about 2-3 years ago who had a lot of HCC and had a liver transplant and subsequently died. I spoke with him at length and i remembe the moderators here were good enough to change is username and wipe his old posts because there was a small risk of it hindering his chances for a liver transplant which he wound up getting.

I dont know what do say.. you sent me a PM and id never say " i told you so". I wish everyone well and AAS i firmly believe can be used safely. There are risks...its not just "genetics" but there are ways to significantly reduce those risks.

Some people just dont care or dont want to believe about liver issues... maybe my view are skewed because ive seen all the issues.

All i can suggest i suppose is for other people to make sure estrogen is in check, use reasonable doses, and limit very androgenic things like tren. Its not only estrogen.

Thank you for taking the time to post, I’m very luck to be alive. What can I say,
at times as bodybuilders especially ones with clinical severe ocd like me, we can be in denial about things.
That life is over for me.

I wanted to ask you, in your experience with these adenomas do you see them usually regress in size or with time disappearing? Especially the ones with beta catenin mutation. Is surgery or transplant down the road my only option? I’m doing best best to avoid more major surgery but maybe again I’m in denial.

 

[maldorf]

Thank you for taking the time to post, I’m very luck to be alive. What can I say,
at times as bodybuilders especially ones with clinical severe ocd like me, we can be in denial about things.
That life is over for me.

I wanted to ask you, in your experience with these adenomas do you see them usually regress in size or with time disappearing? Especially the ones with beta catenin mutation. Is surgery or transplant down the road my only option? I’m doing best best to avoid more major surgery but maybe again I’m in denial.

They haven't talked about excising the diseased portions of the liver if it doesn't clear up on its own? The liver is a huge organ and can regenerate fairly fast. Why they can take 1/2 your liver and transplant it into someone else and the donar lives a normal life afterward. I know a guy that gave half of his to his mother.

 

[sazo75]

Was this due to the constant elevation of high estrogen via steroids ?