Imagine you have a beautiful kitchen counter. Over the years, if you keep spilling things, cutting directly on it, and forgetting to clean up, it develops scratches and stains. Cirrhosis is sort of like that, except it’s your liver that’s getting scarred.
In medical terms, cirrhosis is the late stage of liver damage, where healthy liver tissue gets replaced with scar tissue. This makes it harder for the liver to do its 500+ important jobs (yes, your liver is that busy). Think detoxifying your blood, storing nutrients, making proteins; you name it, the liver probably has a role.