Morning Weeps

It’s a strange thing to wake up feeling okay – after a decent sleep, relatively pain-free, and then find yourself in tears for no reason at all. Stranger still, it doesn’t matter what you’re thinking about. Good thoughts, bad thoughts, or nothing at all – the tears come anyway.

This isn’t about mood, depression, or emotion. It’s about chemistry.

The liver is the body’s great cleaner. One of its many jobs is to process ammonia, a by-product that comes from breaking down proteins. Normally, your liver filters it out and your body gets rid of it. But when the liver can’t keep up, most of the ammonia still leaves through digestion – and some of it lingers in the brain, especially while you’re at rest.

That’s what triggers the “morning weeps”: tears that arrive out of nowhere, before your day has even begun.

The liver has a way of staying quiet early on, hiding the warning signs. And then, as its function decreases, it tosses us the strangest, most ridiculous symptoms to cope with. Once my portal hypertension (high pressure in the vein to the liver) started in late 2024, more of those symptoms began showing up – some annoying, some painful, all significant. Of them, the morning weeps are one of the hardest. Anything can set them off, and most mornings, they’re simply there.

For me, the only way through is to sit with my pups on the bed, let the wave wash over, and wait it out. They don’t care about ammonia or brain fog; they just want to be beside me. And usually, after a while, the flood passes.

I know that one day it won’t. Hepatic encephalopathy traps us eventually; the brain has no defense against the ammonia that the liver no longer handles. But for now, each time I can shake off that morning fog, I remind myself that the day is still mine to live.

It’s all relative.

jj thompson, liverfriendly.org