Open aneurysm repair journey.

Tell me about your journey through your aneurysm repair. Okay, well, primarily it was the iliac aneurysms that were really what involved me with the hospital. I had had quite a lot of pain overall, probably two or three years back, and my GP was having difficulty sort of tying this down. And we, I had previously had, I can't think of the word for it now. Anyway, it involved me sort of taking steroids to sort of kill this pain and I forget the word for it now. But in the course of that, she took loads and loads of blood tests. And there was one there, which is a D-dimer test, which meant nothing to me, I'd never heard of it. And she phoned me a Sunday evening at 10 o'clock in the evening, I mean, you know, from a GP, I mean, you know, I'm impressed. And she said, I want you at the hospital tomorrow morning, because she had seen the results of this test and this D-dimer test, and it was way through the roof. but apparently it indicates the possibility of blood clots and so on. And so I went there and had various scans and this is where they picked up these two iliac aneurysms that I had. And this was in August last year and they were concerned. And I was all set to have them dealt with in September and then it went totally quiet. I mean, I presume because of lockdown and nothing else was happening. And and then he wasn't until. I mean, late April this year, I suppose the hospital got back to me and said, we want to do it like now. And apparently these aneurysms were quite, quite large. but I was totally unaware of them. I'd gone on to the other treatment, the steroid treatment, which was dealing with the pain and I was feeling perfectly comfortable. And I went to the hospital feeling fit and healthy, but I was warned that I was gonna be feeling pretty dreadful afterwards, immediately afterwards. So yeah, and I had the treatment for the iliac aneurysms. And it was only when I spoke to the consultant last week that he told me that while they were down there in a sense, you know, they thought while they were down there, they dealt with this aortic aneurysm, which I had, which I knew I'd had, and I knew it was there and it had been there for several years. and I was regularly screened for it. But it was at the lowest level of screening. So, you know, I went for the screening every six months and that was fine and it stayed the same. But I think basically it was because eventually it was gonna need treatment. And so I suppose they thought, well, while they're doing the others, they do this one as well. So that's where the aortic aneurysm came into the picture. picture. I knew of it, but I was totally unaffected by it. And here I am now feeling perfectly fit again.