Liver Trouble
Overworked and underappreciated, the liver quietly goes about its business while the heart gets all the headlines. Still, if your liver goes south you've got real problems. Here are a few famous people who've suffered from Liver Trouble.
The mythical Titan PROMETHEUS had ancient history's most famous liver problem. According to myth, Prometheus angered Zeus by favoring mortal men over the gods, even stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humankind. Bulfinch's Mythology describes what happened next: "[Zeus] had him chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where an eagle preyed on his liver, which was renewed as fast as devoured." For 30 long years the eagle returned each day to gnaw the liver, until the hero Hercules arrived and slew the bird, freeing Prometheus from his doom.
Modern-day daredevil EVEL KNIEVEL broke dozens of bones in his motorcycle stunt career, but it was a bum liver that almost shut him down for good. Knievel contracted hepatitis from a blood transfusion during one of his many operations, and the disease worsened as years went by. Knievel's failing health was heavily publicized before he finally got a new liver in January of 1999.
Also heavily publicized was the case of DAVID CROSBY. The singer, a member of rock supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, was equally famous for his hard-living ways offstage. He racked up multiple convictions for drug and alcohol abuse, drunk driving, and gun possession. By 1994 he needed a liver transplant. The case sparked a public discussion of transplant ethics -- in particular, whether self-induced liver failure should take a person out of the running for a donor liver. But Crosby got his transplant in November of 1994, and grew healthy enough to return to the stage.
One colleague of Crosby's was JOHN PHILLIPS, the founder of the 1960s pop group The Mamas and The Papas. (Crosby's group The Byrds played at the Phillips-organized Montery Pop Festival in 1967.) Phillips noted in interviews that The Mamas and The Papas bonded by taking LSD together (it was legal in those days), and drug and alcohol consumption seemed to be regular part of Phillips's life for much of the next two decades. He went through drug rehab and reportedly kicked the habit in the 1980s, but by 1992 he still needed (and received) a liver transplant. He died in 2001 of heart failure brought on by a severe stomach virus.
Baseball hero MICKEY MANTLE had double liver trouble: cirrhosis from years of major-league drinking, and hepatitis C, possibly contracted from a transfusion during one of his many knee surgeries. When Mantle went in for a liver transplant in June of 1995, doctors discovered a third problem: his old liver was also cancerous. The transplant was a success, but the cancer led to his death two months later. According to the Washington Post obituary, "Drugs he had taken to prevent his body from rejecting the new liver had weakened his immune system, making it easier for the cancer to spread."
See more Who2 Loops!
ADVERTISEMENT:
