This is Chris' story of living with and receiving treatment for an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Here he discusses his experience with the common nature of aortic aneurysms that present no symptoms.
It was only after his diagnosis that he recognised the potential symptoms of collapsing due to aneurysm rupture and mortality.
Transcript (auto-generated)
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
I didn't have any symptoms at all of the aneurysm, I was talking to myself reasonably fit either with running or with swimming or with both, swimming being obviously reasonably available in Africa, and so I didn't have any symptoms, nor did I have any symptoms for the prostate because it was very very small, there was very little enlargement to the prostate which would have caused some symptoms. The second thing is there were a number of other people who were, because I knew I had the sanerism now and there was a kind of six-month gap before I had the procedure done, quite a few people were saying, not surgeons but doctors were saying, look, get this done because I know of somebody who died and one particular widow who'd lost her husband to an aneurysm which had ruptured and he died. And the other side of this was, the second part of this, was a former protege of mine, I was an army officer for many years and I trained this guy at Sandhurst. He was one of my officer cadets, he was a trainee. He then served for a while, flew helicopters as I had done, and then left and took up his primary qualification law and worked as a lawyer and I knew his wife and they had three kids, but before he even reached the age of 50, he collapsed, and I understand that to have been a ruptured aneurysm. And so I guess the key learning here is once you know you've got an aneurysm, then deal with it. It would have been impossible for me to say, okay, well, I know it's there, I'll just be careful, and keep an eye on it. But actually, because it was borderline action level, I felt it was, in the end, I took the decision to have it done and to have it done before the prostate was treated. And I think that's really important.
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