I'm back home now, but my mind is still reeling from spending a week with Mum and Dad. I hadnt seem them since April this year and in four short months, Dad seems to have aged significantly and Mum eleven years younger than he, loses more and more of her self-confidence and ability to be happy.
At seventy-three my dad has survived several minor heart/agina-esk attacks, high cholesterol and blood pressure, tryke (nasty cleaning acid) in his eye, and blistering sun-burn and sun stroke whilst on holiday in Portsmouth, which I remember vividly as a kid. He smoked three packets of cigarettes a day for more than forty years. Too addicted to stop, he ignored Mum and I, both asthmatics, who pleaded with him to give it up for all our sakes. But its not lung cancer, or heart disease which is the cross my Dad must bear in old age. Its the little talked about, debilitating and incredibly painful aliment of leg ulcers.
The first one happened back in 1998. Dad had bumped his leg at work and the small scratch on the front of his leg refused to heal. Instead grew in size and quickly engulfed the entire front shin. It left Dad's leg chewed up, like it has been mangled in a car wreck, and took over a year to get better. During those months, we needed to change doctors to have more experienced help, Dad was ordered to stop smoking or potentially loose his leg, and he was unable to work for 9 months. It shocked us all, as the canker spread and grew deeper, at its worst growing in size by five centimeters overnight. It was not a hidden, silent disease. Mum to this day describes it as a alien which came into our world, a flesh-eating nasty who tore up healthy flesh and made it smell and rot. To me it was reminiscent of the plague or medieval times, something Henry VIII had suffered from.
At the time, it was hard to believe very little was known of the causes and nature of leg ulcers, and that methods of treating the open sores were more than 50 years old. Dad's doctor however, was convinced smoking was to blame. Its now widely understood smoking long term causes veins to fur up and retreat (amongst so many other problems ), preventing all the goodness carried by the blood to reach the much needed affected area. And in Dad's case help heal the broken skin.
Dad's smoking story had begun with my Uncle Ray (Dad's older brother by two years, now deceased) who went in the army to do his National Service to the British Empire back in the fifties, and came back puffing. My dad was horrified and openly berated him, until a couple of years later when he too completed service to his country in Her Majesty's Royal Staffordshire Regiment as a Corporal in the British army. After serving as a peace keeper in split Cypress, he came back to the village with fags in his pocket. Everyone was shocked, as he'd before hated it so much. More than forty years on, it took our doctor a single question to make him stop. "Do you like to drive?" the doctor asked? "Yes!" my dad replied, "Well, I can get this leg better, but you have to stop smoking. If you don't, I cannot guarantee to save your leg." My dad came home and never smoked another cigarette. I often think about the courage, or fright he had to instantly give it up, either way we were all pleased to see the back of them.
The leg healed slowly, but by the following Spring Dad was back at work and no-one would know any different apart from the ugly scaring. The days of showing off those slim calves (those I would have killed for, something I did not inherit!) were over. And. so for almost a decade we never thought about the horrors of leg ulcers. Until one day when Dad had a small fall, and our worst nightmare unfolded - the wound wouldn't heal. That was 3 years ago, and today we are still living with Mum's so-called alien -- it consumes my dad and our family, it simply refuses to go away.
In twelve years we now have better care, more research has been done on ulcers and new treatments are available, but Dad is older and his troubles are compounded by the best friend of leg ulcers - type 2 diabetes.
We all refuse to believe that its never going to heal up and go away, and we are fighting it as best we can. We want our dad and husband back the way he was - pain free, with a skip in his step and those darling footballer's legs!
That's what we're all working towards -- nurses, doctors, Mum and I.
