Personal Story
Clive Parsons
As my health declined exhaustion persuading me to take the surgeon’s advice to get a ‘sedentary job’ I gave up my electrician’s career and some time during the summer of 1968 I was sent by my doctor for a ‘Schilling’s’ test where I drank a glass of radioactive vitamin B12 and was given a massive injection of B12 into my arm. My urine was collected over a period of time and measured for the amount of radioactive B12 passed but as the results were ‘inconclusive’ I heard no more about it.
Four years later my doctor, desperate to find what was wrong with me, played a hunch and sent me for another ‘Schilling’s Test’. So, sometime during the spring of 1972 I duly presented myself at Stoke Mandeville Hospital for another ‘radio active’ drink and large ‘sample’ container.
It was on the Wednesday afternoon of 10th May that I duly presented myself at the surgery and my doctor greeted me with the words “Do you want the good news – or the bad news?” I said that perhaps she ought to give me the ‘bad news’ first. She replied “The bad news is, that you’re going to die – and you’re going to die within the next three years”.
Naturally I was somewhat rather keen to know what the ‘good news’ was. So I asked what the ‘good news’ was. She said, with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, “The good news is you’re not going to die within three years if you have regular injections (of vitamin B12) from now, for the rest of your life.”
Down through the next 38 years I was never monitored or asked by either doctors or nurses how I was coping with my PA. However I was beginning to notice that in the run up to my next injection I was beginning to have some of the symptoms associated with it – pins & needles, burning legs/feet, shooting pains in hands, numbness, breathlessness, tinnitus, loss of balance, back pains, fog days etc.
On Friday 16th April 2010 I joined the Pernicious Anaemia Society and posted the following: “I was diagnosed with PA back in 1972 consequent upon having had surgery for a peptic ulcer in April 1959 at the tender age of 17. So, for nigh on 40 years I have ‘got by’ with my 4 weekly injections – my ‘little shots of Red-Ex’ as I call them. However when I complain to my GP that in the run up to the next jab I start to feel symptoms returning… he simply laughs, telling me (essentially) that it’s ‘all in the mind’ and that the dosage will last for a month. How can this be? This ‘one size fits all’ syndrome that doesn’t take into account size, (I’m 6’4” @ 13.5 stones) age, activity or metabolism. I cannot believe that I am the only person with PA who experiences this feeling of exhaustion in the run up to the next shot – or am I?”
I was astounded at how many ‘fellow sufferers’ there were ‘out there’ who experienced the same thing and so for the last twelve years I’ve been learning more about the condition.
When shortly after the diabetes diagnosis in 2015 I had my first (ever) retinography ‘eye test’ it was found that there was already damage to the retina in my left eye. This may well have been caused more by the P.A. than the diabetes as I remember my doctor saying back in 1972 that my eyes would be ‘checked’ – they never were. The nurses just laughed and giggled at me when I said “look into my eyes”.
About four years ago in 2018 I finally persuaded my current doctor to ‘allow’ me to have my injections at the surgery to be done every three weeks and since Covid-19 shut off access to surgeries I have been fortunate that my wife has been willing and able to give me my B12 injections.
I still know when the three weeks are up by an increase in exhaustion feelings but I can give an assurance that there is ‘life after PA’ and I’m still ‘Clivealive’ at the age of 81 as I write in December 2022.