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.
