INTRODUCING MATTY ROCHE.
of two weeks that hadn't been done previously. They explained to me that the rest of the leg had been starved of arterial blood supply and all of the main blood vessels had begun to disintegrate and cease to exist. They said I had two options, one was to Incorporating fitness into your daily life can be a chore for some people. lose my leg or because I had a highly With this, training to see significant gains and changes to your body can active lifestyle they could try and do be a long and hard journey that often takes people months of bypass surgery - which would entail dedication before seeing changes. Matthew Roche trains up to five days taking the vein from my thigh and a week usually, and does so with a prosthetic leg. We learn more about inserting it as a new artery down near Matthews story in a personal interview. my ankle. Obviously I opted for that, as it meant I could keep my leg.
By Nathalie K elly
When and how did you lose your leg? I lost my leg on July 15 2008. This was the culmination of a long series of events, which began with symptoms in my late teens and early twenties. Any time I tried to do exercise my foot would become painful and I'd get cramps and shooting pains going half-way up my shin. I had this investigated, but the doctors failed to diagnose the problem. Over the years, continuous exercise made these symptoms worse until I had to start giving up various jobs, such as my job as a dancer and a nurse due to the fact it was too
painful. As it turns out, what was happening was that the calf muscles in my leg were overdeveloped from birth and there was an abnormal insertion in one of my muscles leading to the entrapment of the popliteal artery, which runs behind the knee. Over a five-year period, this repeated crushing sensation of the artery eventually led to it weakening and narrowing until it subsequently collapsed. I had to fly back from a holiday in Thailand, having danced on a collapsed artery for about a week, hoping it would just get better. I went back home, had multiple different tests on my leg in the space
The first operation was initially a success, but then there were post-op complications. This led to a haematoma (a solid swelling of clotted blood within the tissues) leading to rapid blood loss from the incision point from ankle to knee, and knee to groin. I was lucky not to die when I was in theatre, as they found and fixed the blood clot that was causing the blood loss. After this, I suffered further complications which led to the muscle on the lateral compartment of my leg increasing massively in volume. This caused an increase in pressure on the fascia, which then