They Told My Wife to Go In & Say Goodbye — I’d Just Had a Liver Transplant & Now My Stomach Had Burst. I Had a 4% Chance of Survival.

Episode 50 | Will Gordon — Two Transplants, a Perforated Stomach & a 4% Survival Rate: The Season Finale That Will Stay With You

In this staggering, life-affirming season finale, Jimmy sits down with Will Gordon — host of the Will Power Podcast, former teacher, liver and kidney transplant recipient, and one of the most remarkable recovery stories in the English-speaking world.

Will grew up the youngest of four brothers in a high-achieving Irish Catholic family near Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a Hall of Fame hockey coach whose name carried serious weight in the community. Expectations were sky-high, failure was not an option, and Will — who secretly wanted to do stand-up comedy and be in plays — became a teacher instead, because that’s what Gordons did. He taught for 14 years.

It was teaching that broke him. Not the good teaching — the Montessori years he loved, the alternative high school kids who had reasons for being difficult. It was a Catholic middle school in the north end of Boston, crammed with behaviour kids, no staff rotation, no structure. By 2018 Will was racing to his car at 2:30pm every afternoon to chug straight vodka from a sports bottle just to stop the withdrawal shakes — not to get drunk, just to function. By the time COVID hit and he was teaching remotely from home, the drinking start time crept earlier and earlier until it was 11am.

His wife noticed first. In 2020, she took one look at his yellowing skin and eyes and made him see a doctor. Hepatitis of the liver. He was 32. The doctor told him: “You are either going to be back here or in a grave.” He got sober for 125 days — white-knuckling it, no support, no programme. Then a radio ad for pink lemonade vodka. A huge fight with his wife about money. A bottle hidden in a pile of clean laundry for four days. And then one day he opened it, and the second the alcohol touched his tongue he knew he’d just erased 125 days. He kept going.

By 2022 he had ballooned to 265 pounds — almost entirely from ascites, the fluid build-up caused by a failing liver. His skin was paper-yellow. His eyes were dark yellow. His feet were so swollen he needed specialist wide-fit shoes. He was filling giant 1.75-litre vodka handles into pre-prepared Gatorade bottles, hiding them around the apartment, behind cereal boxes, in his car. His wife had learned to smell every water bottle in the house. He was leaving for “work” every morning, driving 50 feet around the corner, parking on a side street, drinking alone until he passed out in the back seat, then driving back to the parking spot nine hours later.

Easter 2022. His wife took one look at him and drove him to hospital. His bilirubin was 32 — it should be 1. His MELD score was 40 out of 40 — the maximum. He was told he had two weeks to live. The hospital refused to transplant him: policy required six months of sobriety, and he was at four. Hospice was brought into the room. His father — who had never looked at Will with anything but expectation — couldn’t look at him at all.

Then a doctor who had told him there was nothing she could do made one call to a former colleague. At 6am the next morning, Will’s phone rang. He went in. He made his case — openly, honestly, weeping,

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My Instagram is:

https://www.instagram.com/recovery_jimmy

And you can find all my other links at:

https://linktr.ee/jimmythistle

Buy me a coffee…

https://buymeacoffee.com/afterhourswithjimmyt

Alcohol Explained - William Porter

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This Naked Mind - Annie Grace

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A Million Little Pieces - James Frey

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Donate:

https://motiv8.im/donate/

https://nacoa.org.uk/get-involved/donating/donate/

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