A PENSIONER has thanked a pioneering screening programme that saved his life as it marks more than two decades of helping men in the region.

Highworth resident Bob Carless believed he was perfectly fit and healthy, but when he received a call out of the blue in October 2012 inviting him to have a scan with the Gloucestershire and Swindon Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Screening Programme he went along with it thinking it could not do any harm.

He said: “I remember vividly walking out of our front door and saying to my wife: ‘Why did I agree to this? There is nothing wrong with me, I feel just fine, my diabetes and angina are all under control and I have better things to be doing’, so off I went smugly confident that they would tell me what I already knew.”

But the scan showed Bob did in fact have a complicated aneurysm. After a CT scan at the Great Western Hospital he was referred to a consultant surgeon at Cheltenham General Hospital, and his consultant recommended he went for the full open surgery procedure.

Bob said: “I was not put under any pressure to have the procedure and all the details were laid out in order for me to make a decision either then or go away and think about it.

“I agreed to proceed with the full open operation as, yes there was a risk involved it would be silly not to realise it however as the ‘do nothing’ option would leave me forever wondering if today was the day it would burst, any little unconnected illness would make you worry, and if it did burst would you be in the right place with the most experienced surgeons ready to help you immediately – the answer is most probably not, so it was a no brainer to go ahead.”

Bob spent 18 days in hospital after he had to be taken back for emergency surgery after a week due to an infection in the wound which led to pneumonia, otherwise he says he would have been out in just over a week.

“My consultant surgeon and his team and the nursing staff on the ward as well as the multitude of other departments involved in my care were excellent,” he said.

“I would urge anyone who has the opportunity to have the AAA scan to do so.

"Although I developed a few complications along the way, I am fit, well and do not have to worry about bursting aneurysms."

“If diagnosed, listen to your consultant, ask all the questions you need to have answered and make your decision, you will not be put under pressure just the facts laid out with a recommendation; it is up to you. For me it was the right and most sensible thing to do and I owe the service a debt of gratitude along with all the other professionals and staff at both Cheltenham and Cirencester Hospitals in the diagnosis, treatment and care shown during the time I spent both pre-op and post care.”

The service for over-65s screening for the potentially fatal expansion and weakening of the main blood vessels has invited more than 100,000 people for screening and referred more than 1,300 men for surgery to repair aneurysms.

Nationally, about 5,000 people, most of them older men, die every year after large aneurysms burst.