Did you have any side effects of the operation?

Side effects of the operation for me, probably more worry than anything. But I had a lot of pain in me left side where I had the operation, where they cut in, you know they, it was all stapled up and a lot of numbness there. And that went on for about I would say well over twelve months maybe even a bit longer. Although I know doctors will say it may last six months but no an easy twelve months for me.

Where was the incision, the back or the front?

The incision was in the back, it was right from me shoulder blade right down, you know with the, its supposed to be about twelve inches but I’d say its about eighteen inches on me. And I’m aware that theres some different formation on that side of me body where they must have had to move ribs about you know. And I got a lot of pain there for a long time, couldn’t sleep on that side.

Does that still bother you now?

It still bothers me yeah, because I find if I’m laying on me right side, theres one side where it affects me breathing, its like I’m cutting the oxygen off so you know.

Do you have to take any medication for that?

No, no painkillers maybe, but I don’t take nothing really. I do occasionally have to go and get an inhaler, because I find, I’m OK, me breathing’s fine, perfect really but sometimes if I do something sudden it leaves me gasping and a bit panicky at times you know.

From then on the major problem I’ve had has been one of breathing. I’m fine if I can do things at my own pace but when the, when I do something at something elses pace or I stop, I don’t think, then I get breathless, even now, even two years later. So my breathing is hampered and that is the greatest knock on effect as far as I’m concerned because I’m not used to it, I’ve never been, I’ve always been used to being Oh, to do what I want to do when I want to do it and now I can’t;

Even taking my beautiful dog for a walk is a strain because hes a big dog and he likes to, so my partner takes him out three nights a week and I take him short walks two or three times, well twice a day usually and we get on that way. But climbing the hill; and it’s not that big a hill, up to my house because of the inactivity of my whole body for the last three years my legs are like jelly at the top; It’s very difficult to get round it so I’m actually starting a fitness course shortly to try and overcome these things. But added to which I’m carrying three and a half stone more weight than I was originally and this is largely due to the prednisolone, the steroids, and inactivity and probably a little bit of lack of discipline as well (laughs) on my part.

So what was it like when you got home?

Getting home initially was quite frightening really. Because I think when you’re in hospital and you’ve had all this done to you and theres people there all the time you don’t worry too much about it. My daughter moved back home to stay with me for a couple of weeks, when I did come home but shes obviously got to go to work and then living on my own it’s quite nerve-racking to start with. And then you think oh, any little twinge that you’ve got, you start worrying about. But you get over it, you get over it yeah.

Could you walk around the house straight away?

Yes, yes, yes no I mean I haven’t got an up, a downstairs toilet, I’d got to go you know upstairs to the toilet each time I went to the toilet so yeah I was up and about. And because you’re walking very, you walk quite slowly to start with so you don’t really notice being short of breath. It’s not till you start getting back on your feet and start wanting to do things that you realise how short of breath you can be by just having one lung. And in some respects I’m very lucky because of the job that I did I had like a follow-up and I went away for two, two week sessions up in Cumbria which is complete four weeks physiotherapy.

Wonderful.

Yeah is quite lacking for anybody else. I was very, very lucky indeed.

Because of the job they were paying for it do you mean it was a special thing?

No, yeah well I was actually, I’ve actually be in the Fire Service yeah and the Fire Service have a benevolent fund that look after working firemen that are injured, retired firemen that have a problem or an operation or are injured even and you know all their families and the children. They’ve got rest homes. But the place that I went to in Cumbria was absolutely fantastic. I got, you can’t take family you just go on your own and they’ve got space for about forty people there. And then you go into different groups. The group I went into was obviously for the slower people because they’d only got one lung. But you’ve got physiotherapists that are on hand all day long and working with you to improve the lung capacity of the lung that I’d got left. Now when I first went up there they did lung capacity readings and they were quite low and when I came away after two weeks I’d virtually doubled my lung capacity.

The only side effects I had a little bit of depression, and I was told that’s natural, you’re bound to get depressed you’ve lost a lot from your stomach, you’re bound to get depressed. But that’s gradually getting better now and I think I’ve got over that and that didn’t last too long you know.

Did you have any medicines for that or’?

No, no I didn’t want nothing for that at all, no.

Did you have any other sort of support?

My daughter.

So that helped?

Yes because if I started to cry, “Come on Dad stop it, stop it Dad.” Sometimes I wish they’d have let me get it out you know and probably one good old cry wouldve been the end of it but she used to stop me. I’ve got over it now anyhow you know, you still get tearful a little bit at times but that’s the only side effect I’ve ever had from it.

Did you have anybody else you could talk about it to, any counsellor or somebody?

No, no.

Would you have liked to have had somebody else to talk about it to?

Not really I don’t think so because I don’t know what they could have done really you know. It’s just that you feel like you’ve lost something, you feel like, you don’t feel a man any more because you’ve lost something. But you’ll get over it, I’ve got over mine anyhow.

The next six months following the operation were horrendous. Six weeks later I was back in hospital with terrific chest pains which the emergency GP diagnosed as pleurisy only it wasn’t pleurisy it was an infection in the cavity where the lung had been and, but they didn’t do anything more than treat me with painkillers and so another three weeks later I was back in hospital again. And this time they opened me up and apparently took out a litre and a half of poison which was a lot of poison to be carrying around (laughs). And it was nobody’s fault just one of these things, you get infections and you can’t, it can’t be helped;

When I first had my operation I was going back quite regularly because I had a small problem in so much as where they’d done the operation inside, if you can imagine your throat branches into two sections, one to each lung, where they take your lung out they actually cut it out and then they cover that bit of tube up with a piece of skin I suppose for want of a better word. Well I had what they call a fistula, which is a little hole in that piece of skin which was creating quite a little bit of a problem. Because once you have the operation if everything goes according to plan then the side of the chest that you have your operation does fill up with a kind of fluid, so it takes up the space of where you lung was. But that wasn’t happening with me so I was going back to the hospital quite regular. I then eventually went down to three monthly and then six monthly and at the moment I’m going back every twelve months. I went back in January of this year and I was told then you know well see you in January of next year.

Yes but the nerve supply to the voice box from your brain goes via the lung, it doesn’t go direct to your voice box and because the two work in harmony so the nerve supply, well they expect the nerve supply to go to your spinal cord into your brain, the motor nerve and the sensory nerve. But that’s not the case, both of those systems come down to your left lung and back to your voice box and damage to that nerve supply is not uncommon in that particular procedure. So it left me with only half a voice box and great difficulty breathing. They used to in the old, I think previously they used to give you Teflon injection in the vocal chords which had to be topped up every so often. Nowadays they prefer to do thyroplasty which is to insert a prosthesis under local anaesthetic into the trachea and to close off that gap that’s left and the dormant vocal chords will pick up some of the vibration from the other side as well so it’s reasonably comfortable.

So as well as nerve damage you say theres also, there was a gap?

Well if you imagine the voice box is two harps together and a piece of cartilage in the middle, these cords here have no nerve supply so they’re just dead and dormant and so they’re just laying there and when you enunciate a vowel these chords spread like that and these are lay dormant so the air is just pushing past and you can’t distinguish between breathing and swallowing and you can’t cough because you can’t close your lung. You can’t close your lung to give you the pressure to cough and you lose your coughing reflex, swallowing reflex is difficult and you quite often inspire liquids, which is a bit alarming.

Could you now say a little bit about the side effects of the surgery?

Yes apart from the obvious pain and discomfort I did have a couple of other problems. The normal stay in hospital after the operation is probably about two weeks but after nine days they thought that I was ready to be transferred back to my local hospital. They wanted to transfer me to my local hospital so that, rather than straight home so that the local hospital had knowledge of me if I had any problems. And so they’d arranged for an ambulance to transfer me the hundred and fifty miles and so that morning I got myself out of bed, showered and got dressed and then I felt very breathless and was obviously getting into some distress, I was very hot;

And one of the nurses asked me if I was alright and I said I thought I’d done too much you know because actually getting on the white stockings you have to wear is quite hard and I thought I’d just tried to do too much too quickly. And so he said that hed do the observations they normally do, blood pressure etc and then when, the blood pressure was okay but my pulse was 170 beats minute. And they took it again about five minutes later and it was still the same and so I had to have a cardiograph; And I by then was getting quite worried and the nursing staff were quite worried because apparently when your heart stays that kind of rate then you can have a heart attack or stroke. And so they got the doctor to come and look at me and my heart rate was still at 170 and he said obviously you’re not going to be moved today. And they gave me a drug called amiodarone, quite a high dose and this was just a drug to settle my heart down. And then over the next four or five hours my heart rate came down;

Were there any other side effects of the operations?

Well the side effects since; I developed a rash and I’d been to my GP about it and he didn’t seem to know what it was. Not, they weren’t particularly worried about it, I was worried about it because of all the things you hear about these viruses that go through hospitals and all that but the rash is actually diminishing now. And I’ve also got a cough. Again my GP is not overly concerned about the cough but it would be nice when I go back to see the team at the hospital that did the operation to see what they think about it;

And again one of the other things that I had is really bad wind pains in my upper digestive tract, really severe wind pains. And they were getting so that after I’d eaten if I moved I had like an internal whoopee cushion in my upper digestive tract and really severe pains with that and then occasional a sort of acid reflux. When I went to my GP about that he said again it’s not abnormal for people who’ve had major surgery to have stomach problems and so hes given me a drug to counteract that and since then I don’t get the acid reflux any more. I still get some discomfort in my stomach but not severe pains any more.

I think probably the worst problem was the backache and trying to get comfortable in bed. As I say right from March I’d not been able to lie down in bed, I’d only been able to sit up in bed and when I came home my first night at home, because in hospital I’d had an electric bed that I could adjust the backrest so I could sleep sitting up but at home I slept on just two or three pillows and by the morning I was in such severe pain that my wife actually had to help me get out of bed. And it’s the sort of muscle spasm and also laying on the wound site, over the shoulder blade was very painful. But now most of my pain is gone, I can sleep on both sides and my front. They recommend following the operation when you can actually lie down that you lie on the site of the wound, on the side that’s got the wound in which I never really got an answer as to why because it’s, but in actual fact it is more comfortable lying on that side so I don’t have a problem now.