When Adrian Chiles was walking up a European mountain on a bright summer’s day, he suddenly started feeling tired and nauseous.
At first he put it down to dehydration and exhaustion at making the climb, that is until the presenter realised his left leg – the site of an old football injury – was hot and swollen, so decided to get it checked out.
An initial scan couldn’t find anything wrong but the 57-year-old continued looking for answers, only discovering weeks later that he’d suffered a potentially life-threatening deep vein thrombosis (DVT).
“Just over two years ago, I drove to Croatia, my mum’s country,” he recalls. “We were driving for a long time, which may or may not have caused it.”
The DVT was, he says, “frightening in retrospect – nobody said I’d diced with death or anything, but if it gets dislodged and ends up on your lungs, things can get very unpleasant quickly.
“The clot was in my upper leg and I’ve been told, very gravely, that my leg is ‘post-thrombotic’, which sounds a lot more sci-fi and interesting than it actually is. It means there’s a horrible dried-up clot in the middle of my leg.
“I asked if it would eventually break up but apparently it won’t. I take blood thinners to guard against it happening again, which isn’t risk-free – if you get a bang on the head you can end up with a bleed on the brain.”
The former The One Show presenter has suffered with leg issues since an accident 25 years ago. “I broke my leg in October 1990 playing football. Tib and fib, it was properly broken. I was in plaster for seven months.
“After the break, I started getting varicose veins, varicose eczema – it started looking a bit unsightly, a bit purpley. I was diagnosed with chronic venous incompetence.
“My understanding is that the valves weren’t closing as the blood was being pumped up my leg.”
Doctors have been unable to confirm if damage happened at the time of the accident, as a result of being in plaster for so long, or if it was a coincidence.
For five years, Adrian managed the condition by wearing a heavy-duty class-three compression sock, giving it up 20 years ago after undergoing surgery to improve vein function. But after the DVT, he decided to wear it again.
“One consultant said there’s no point wearing support, another said I should. All I know is, if I don’t wear them, it could swell quite alarmingly. Apart from not looking very nice, it just doesn’t feel satisfactory. If I wear a compression sock, when I take it off at night my leg looks more or less normal. I’ve always worn them for long-haul flights too – if I don’t, it feels like my leg might explode, it really does swell up alarmingly.
“I wear it all the time unless I’m running, when the blood’s pumping around your system so you don’t need compression to maintain circulation. If I’m sitting down or, worse, standing all day the blood just slops to the bottom of my leg and it’s got no way of pumping back up without compression. It becomes swollen and itchy and I risk developing a leg ulcer.
Looking back, Adrian says: “That accident in 1990 changed my life. I’d just done a TEFL course and was about to go abroad to teach English, but couldn’t because I’d smashed my leg.
“I ended up doing a post-grad journalism course at Cardiff University instead, so I’ve got reason to be grateful for it happening – though if you’d told me I’d have to wear a compression sock for the rest of my life I might have thought differently.”