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CHAPTER 8
DYING FROM CHRONIC ALCOHOL POISONING
Bruce Anderson was gazing at death as he stared up at me with terror in his eyes. His lids were drawn back and the globes almost bulged out of their sockets. His sclerae were the color of a crook-necked squash, jaundiced from the bilirubin in his blood stream that a failing liver could not metabolize and remove.
Bruce was in hard restraints- heavy leather hand and ankle cuffs strapped to the frame of the bed so he couldn’t flail about or pull out the tubes and IVs that were keeping him alive. A football helmet was strapped on, with a large rubber tube that entered his nose and went down into his stomach tied to the nose guard. He shook violently from D.T.s; from the chill of the ice water that was being flushed down the tube; and from shock, having lost a third of his blood volume to G.I. (gastrointestinal) bleeding.
Anderson was an alcoholic in the end stages of liver failure and was bleeding from esophageal varices. It was his first bleed. There was a fifty-fifty chance it would be his last. His beard was caked with clotted blood, his hair matted, his arms covered with large purple bruises.
How did this happen to him?
One word.
Alcohol.
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