This is Chris' story of living with and receiving treatment for an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Here he discusses how the decision for treatment is ultimately down to the patient. Doctors offer their clinical expertise but the patient has the weight of finalising the decision making process.
Transcript (auto-generated)
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
The only thing I'd say is, because I've been dealing with three consultants now, obviously the vascular surgeon, a number of different neurologists actually, and then more recently an oncologist who's overseeing my health treatment, I can only, I just can't speak highly enough for all of them, really. In the UK, Kenya was a bit of a mixed bag of advice. And I'm very, very glad I didn't have vascular surgery in Nairobi, to be honest. But yeah, I mean, I probably would have come through it, but I don't think I would have had as good an experience as I had in the UK. And to be fair, the Nairobi surgeons or the consultants all said, look, if you have a chance to have it in the UK, we can do this and we have the schools available. There's just, there are as many people and the facilities aren't quite as good as you're gonna get anywhere in the UK. So yeah, but it was a long journey to get to this. I mean, I could have had this done, to be honest with you, in January. A few days after I'd had the diagnosis of the aneurysm, but because of my job and some confusion around, which was more important than anything else, it took until July. And the one thing I would share about my unique experience, which goes beyond the AAA, obviously, because of the cancer, was there's no one single person in charge in the healthcare system, private or NHS. And in the end, the decision has to be made by you, the patient. And that was quite a daunting prospect. I spent 32 years in the British Army. And there's always somebody who's going to make a decision or advocate firmly a course of action, even if it's not the final decision. And that's the bit that I find disorientating, is that in the end, you have to decide. You can take all the advice you want, but in the end, you have to decide which procedure is going to go first. And I think, I hope that I'll be able to look back in a few years and be grateful that I did it in this order, because of your point about the ticking time bomb. And almost all the surgeons, to be honest, did say, look, your aneurysm is the most life-threatening condition. It's borderline action level in terms of its size, but that's the most immediately life-threatening condition because it could go at any time. And we can manage the very small cancer which haven't spread. And that's kind of second order as an issue. So yeah, that's pretty much all I think I wanted to say.
Comments