Hello all. In this day and age I don't think people are greeted the proper way anymore,so let me start off with...greetings and hello. I always try to be positive and so, I hope you all are doing well or finding ways to deal. 

This is my first support group posting ever, so I'm not really sure what to say. I guess I can start off with, I'm a 40 year old guy, live in Tennessee, married for 22 years and have a wonderful wife and awesome son. I'm not sure how to start this off exception to just jump right in with it.....so, here goes lol.

July 16th, 2015, started off as a regular day in the home maintenance business we have. My wife and son were painting a house. The home owners wanted their metal roof pressure washed, so I started on that. I had just about finished up, except for the back side of the house. Started cleaning and was aware 9 my surroundings, including the height from myself to the ground. Everything was going very good until I told one wrong step and lost my footing and slid down the roof and fell off 25 feet to the ground. I survived the fall but ended up breaking my back in 3 places. (ouch). So, 4 months in a full upper body brace and learning to walk again, I got back on my feet and started to just do little things around the house. The pain was unbearable sometimes, and all the prescription meds being forced on me to take for the pain never made me feel good. So I dumped all meds and just turned to 8 to 12 extra strength tylenol, anvil or ibuprofen each day with a couple of drinks each night just to take the edge off of my back. 

Fast forward to January 2016, my abdomen started filling with fluid, but I would be dehydrated at the same time. Weird I thought. So, doctor after doctor, examination after examination, labs after labs and 7 months later, I finally got in with a gastroenterology specialist who dropped a bomb on my wife and I , the I had stage 4 liver disease and that 80% of my liver was shot. She gave me recommendation to go see a liver specialist at Duke Medical, who looked me over and told us that they could do nothing for me. She gave me a 20% chance to live with in the next 3 months. The only thing that they would do is give me more meds, to deal with the symptoms until I die. Well, not wanting to die, I quit all pain relivers, stopped drinking any and all alcohol and started juicing, taking natural meds like milk thistle and lots of vitamins. In fact I've done so good that I brought my MELD score of 29 from when I was hospitalized and ammonia level being 20 times higher than it should be, to....now my MELD is a 10 and ammonia levels have been fine. However, I'm still dealing with pain in my liver area quite frequently and my doctors say this is normal for how bad my liver was scarred. I am wondering if anyone out here, has had a good recovery for a little while, but then things got worse even though you were doing every good thing possible to stay healthy. Currently, I'm not feeling to bad, but I'm worried about it getting worse again. I have not touch any pain meds or alcohol since July 1st, 2016. I even had surgery to fix my herniated umbilical, due to all of my water retentions in the past months, and I didn't take any pain meds at all because I was to scared to reverse all the good progress I've made. I don't want to go back to how bad it all got. I've had my share of paracentesis's, and not wanting those anymore. But more importantly, I don't want to have to have a transplant. I deal with a bit of depression and I don't always know how to deal with it. Sometimes I just immerse myself in some good ol tunes from the band Boston. (if ya don't know who Boston is, you're missing out on an awesome band). Anyways, there's my story, hopefully it's not boring or whiney lol. Any feed back about any of this is much appreciated and welcome. Thanks for reading this. Mike.