My Mum's Silent Battle with Fatty Liver Disease

It’s hard to believe that just days after my mum’s 59th birthday, she was gone. I never thought that a condition as quiet as Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) could take her life so suddenly. To this day, I keep replaying those last weeks in my head, wondering if things could have been different.

My mum was always active. She wasn’t just someone who liked to stay busy—she was an athlete. She used to run cross-country and even completed a marathon for charity. But as the years went on, her body betrayed her.

Osteoarthritis and spondylitis stole her mobility, and with it, her ability to keep her weight in check. After knee replacement surgery, despite her best efforts to stay active by swimming, the damage to her liver had already begun its silent attack. We didn’t know it, but she was fighting a battle no one had warned her about.

"Her abnormal liver tests were ignored for years."

What still haunts me is that my mum had multiple liver function tests (LFTs) over the years, starting as far back as 2004. They always came back abnormal, but no one ever thought to dig deeper. Her doctors dismissed it. After all, she didn’t drink alcohol and rarely even took painkillers, so how could her liver be in trouble? What they didn’t know—or didn’t bother to investigate—was that obesity, even due to immobility, was enough to put her at serious risk for NAFLD. No one told her. No one helped her.

In the months before she passed, I noticed something was off. She wasn’t herself. She barely wanted to eat, and her mood had darkened. We all thought it was related to her knee surgery and the chronic pain she had lived with for so long. But there were subtle signs we didn’t understand. Her memory seemed foggy, and her hands would spasm, sometimes so violently that she’d spill her tea without even realizing it. In hindsight, these were all red flags of liver disease, but at the time, we were clueless.

"When I saw her jaundiced, I knew something was very wrong."

A few weeks after her surgery, I went to visit her. She had been bedridden for days, fighting off an infection from the surgery. But when she finally made it to the living room, I was shocked by what I saw. Her skin had turned yellow, and I instantly knew it was jaundice. I felt a wave of panic as we rushed her to the GP. The doctor agreed she needed to go to the hospital, suspecting a blockage from gallstones.

They kept her in the hospital for weeks, running test after test, but her condition kept deteriorating. By the time they finally diagnosed her with NAFLD, it was too late. Her liver was failing. She developed encephalopathy, which left her confused and disoriented, and then, just days later, she had a stroke.

"I watched her slip away, and there was nothing I could do."

Those final moments are burned into my memory. Surrounded by her family, we watched her slip away, powerless to save her from a disease that we never even knew she had. It still feels unreal. Liver disease sneaks up on you. It doesn’t announce itself loudly, and by the time it does, it can be too late.

The worst part is knowing it didn’t have to end like this. If only her doctors had taken her abnormal LFTs seriously. If only they had known to screen her for NAFLD because of her weight. If only we had known what the warning signs were. Maybe then she would still be here today. But instead, we’re left wondering what could have been.