The leg

I apologise to anyone who has stumbled across this blog from time to time & revisited the blog in the vain hope of updated enlightenment. It has not been updated in a while.

I have been busy with virtual aircraft creation which has been documented in my other blogs, The Wing Fell Off & the Biff Diaries. I have also recently started a new job which has kept me away from my computer.

I had hoped to revive this blog with something more positive than health issues.

If you glance down this page or check the blog archives you will notice that I am diabetic and have had past problems with UTI & pyelonephritis. Some of the problems mentioned in that article have continued & some have returned..... plus a whole lot more.

Petechiae persisted in large numbers, I guess peaking last summer, and have recently started to clear & ease up from my feet. I took that as in indication that whatever had been causing them was in the process of clearing from my body. UTI symptoms have come & gone. Lymph adenopathy has persisted in a variable manner, for some reason affecting the right side of my body from beneath my ear to the back of my knee. I have been generally feeling well during this period.

Unfortunately commuting to work by public transport drew another health issue to the attention of myself and to the medical profession. Sitting on buses & ferries I experienced pain, stiffness & swelling behind my right knee & in the lower thigh. There had been a bit of swelling & soreness there for quite some time. This had intermittently occured for a number of years and had been attributed to whatever was causing lymph adenopathy. (A haematologist placed this variable condition in the context of a pyelonephritis which had possibly turned septic & been complicated.) Most GP's from 2003 did not worry about the adenopathy. Thus I had been ignoring the little bit of pain & swelling thinking it was minor adenopathy.

After arriving home from work with a somewhat bloated right leg I decided to visit a GP. When checking me out he noticed a large mass on the right thigh. I was promptly sent for an ultra scan which revealed a large mass approximately 10cm in size, though I was told it was too large to scan accurately. The doctor made a hospital outpatients appointment for an MRI scan.

In the interim the leg was still swelling badly, probably aggravated by commuting, walking and sitting at a desk all day, and was absolutely huge when I arrived home from work in the evening. I visited a GP again and this time my blood vessels were scanned which revealed some compression caused by the mass but also, more seriously, a thrombosis which the doctor thought may have been a DVT. Next thing I was in the back of an ambulance and off to hospital.

Anyway to cut a long story short, the thrombosis transpired to be superficial rather than DVT. I am being treated with a blood thinning agent, Clexane, while awaiting surgery (a biopsy). The whole situation is not good. I am hoping it is benign. Different people have told me different things. The sonographer who carried out the ultrascan told me that it did not look like cancer as it is separate from the muscles and that cancer usually grows into the muscles and causes muscle wastage. However she also said you cannot really tell from an ultrascan. It needs a MRI + Biopsy to tell for certain. The orthopaedic doctor I saw yesterday said it was most likely malignant due to it's size & speed of development. However these doctors are assuming that because it came to my attention recently it developed recently. The thigh has been visibly enlarged since 2002, that was confirmed by former GP. In 2001 that GP examined my legs telling me "..... there would have to be a hell of a lot of bacteria to cause all this, your joints would have to be infected to cause all this, ..... and you'd have to have sceptecemia for that to happen." (He had originally told me my joints were affected by a post viral condition which was causing bacterial toxins to be released into the bloodstream). He suspected a small tumour somewhere as the most likely cause of my problems or some other cancer such leukemia or lymphoma trying to happen but taking time to show consistently in blood tests.

Anyway a biopsy will tell for sure..... hopefully.



Rob