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What support have you had from diagnosis through to your treatment?
Support MechanismsAdvisory ChallengesCommunity EngagementSurgical Considerationsaneurysmbiopsysurgeryophthalmologyurologyvascular surgery

What support have you had from diagnosis through to your treatment?

This is Chris' story of living with and receiving treatment for an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Here he discusses the types of support he received throughout the whole journey and what support he prioritised when deciding his treatment pathway.

Transcript (auto-generated)

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.

And my wife was with me in Nairobi, I'm actually in London at the moment, you know, coming towards the end of my treatment for the two conditions which I've already described. No, my wife was with me there, so I had her support but obviously she was anxious about it as well. Okay, just to put a timescale, I mean, this was January 2021. The decision not to go ahead with the biopsy was made in the same month. And I continued to see the urology consultant, Dr. McGarry, even after I'd had this consultation and he had opinions on the relative importance of the two conditions. So I had plenty of advice, but as I kind of alluded to earlier, it wasn't always consistent. And so I was seeing this urology consultant, Dr. McGarry, and he was really nice and very, very helpful and talked about the kind of treatments that could be offered for everything really. As far as the vascular surgeon was concerned, a guy called Dr Kariuki, Mr Kariuki, he was helpful but I didn't have the same kind of rapport with him and really I mean I saw him I think once more after the, no I didn't, I don't think I saw him again actually, Eventually, I went ahead and tried to apply for financial support from my health insurance to have the procedure done in Nairobi, but in the back of my mind, casual encounters actually with other medical professionals in Nairobi, they were saying, and I'm talking about African, this guy in particular was a Ugandan, he was just a guy I was sitting a waiting room with when I was waiting for my wife to come out of surgery after having had an eye operation in Nairobi he said oh we've got an aneurysm you need to make sure that you've that wherever you have it done there's a really good um high cu because you know it's it's extensive this surgery is very very invasive and challenging. So yeah the support was okay but you know in Africa I was finding it really hard to get you know good clear advice and it wasn't until June and I'll pause in a moment but it wasn't until June 2021 that actually I followed up with UK surgeons and that was because of a personal change in circumstance in terms of work. So yeah, the support was there, but it was confusing and a little difficult to understand.

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