What the heck am I rattling on about

What the heck am I rattling on about?

My name is Ed, I'm a writer, geek, and wannabe photographer among other things but lately I've been dealing with liver cancer, chemo, a liver transplant, hepatitis C, a hernia repair gone haywire, a... hell. Let me explain with one of those irritating run-on mini-monologues:

Forever docs have been fretting about my liver because blood test numbers always came in well above "normal" so they bugged me and bugged me about those numbers (without ever offering an explanation or a fix) until I finally told them "don't talk about my liver unless the numbers are weird for me" and they reluctantly complied sort of but not really because they kept an eye on the miscreant organ and when the test for Hepatitis C became available I found out that was the snarky disease causing the problem yet amazingly my liver kept on chugging - "compensating" in the medical jargon - and I bicycled on and life was mostly good although about five years ago liver-related bumps in the road like anemia and varices (swollen and bleeding veins in your deep throat) popped up now and then but still I cycled merrily forward until March 2006 when all hell broke loose with the discovery of HCC a.k.a. HepatoCellular Carcinoma a.k.a. liver cancer and as HCC kills quickly I was rushed into the liver transplant program at UCSF for evaluation and due to my physical shape (very good), my mental shape (also pronounced very good which shows just how inexact medical science can be) and plain luck I got a new liver in July of 2006 and was on the road to a fabulous recovery and was plotting bicycle century rides (ok, kilometer centuries, not miles) and going to the Transplant Olympics when the Hepatitis C came back which we always expected but not as as expected where it'd ruin Dax - Dax being the new liver (thank you RLL for the name) - in 10 or 20 years which is ok when you're 50 but in a "cholestatic variant" of HCV that eats your liver up in months which is never ok and so I spent a year on massive doses of interferon and a bunch of other toxic drugs to try and keep Dax from giving up the ghost and taking me along with him which may have put an end to the cholestatic problem but didn't eradicate the HCV and then... (breathe) enough. Unfortunately these days I'm not bicycling very far. 

Believe it or not this really is the digest version. Ok, probably not the best example of succinctness, but hopefully it'll help make sense of my ramblings.