Of intimate probes and rat killer... (From The Northern Echo)

Of intimate probes and rat killer...

11:13am Saturday 13th February 2010 in

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A STRANGE man peeled back my underpants with one hand and probed the innermost folds of my groin with his other. His delicate fingers slid easily about on the lubricating gel smeared on my skin, feeling gently, searching expertly.

I lay on my back, legs spread, my vulnerability exposed to the world. A latex aroma wafted from his snap-tight rubber gloves and I wondered if this experience might be marketable: there are, after all, some very peculiar people about.

“You have,” he said, breaking the spell, “a large clot.” His fingers pressed painfully into my right inner thigh and spanned two inches into my groin’s intimate recesses. “Look, there’s no beat in there.” He slid the ultrasound equipment through the gel and on his screen my heart’s throb faded to a flatline.

He rolled me over and found another smaller clot at the top of my calf muscle. Two deep vein thromboses. They’d been caused by knee surgery at the start of the year. My body took exception to having my leg sliced open so a polyester ligament could be inserted, and it sent in the clotting agents to prevent bleeding.

Three weeks later, these clots jammed a blood vessel, causing pain far more excruciating than the surgery.

“It’s the rat killer for you,” said my GP almost joyfully, stroking his beard like Father Christmas as he handed over the prescription.

He put me under the care of Nurse Jackie at the Darlington Memorial Hospital Anticoagulation Clinic. Over the years, causes have come and gone with their placards and protests – anti-fascism, anti-apartheid, antianimal testing, anti-poll tax, anti-pasto – without bothering me. Now, I’m so fully signed up to anti-coagulation that I’m even boycotting cranberry juice because it may interfere with my medication, which consists of a daily injection – after a week of subcutaneous injections in a two-inch radius around my navel, I’m as perforated as a postage stamp – and doses of one of the world’s most prescribed drugs: warfarin.

In the early 1920s, cattle started bleeding mysteriously to death in the northern United States and Canada. A Canadian vet, Frank Schofield, found sweet clover in their hay. He used a rabbit as a guinea pig, first feeding it fresh sweet clover. When it survived, he fed it mouldy sweet clover from the hay, and the bunny haemorrhaged to death.

In the 1940s, biochemistry PhD students at Wisconsin University discovered that the anti-coagulant in the clover hay was a natural chemical called coumarin, which became more potent as the clover broke down.

In 1945, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (Warf) patented the chemical, using its acronym plus “arin” from coumarin to form warfarin. They marketed it as rat killer, but in 1951, after a US naval recruit ate vast quantities but failed to commit suicide, doctors wondered if heart attack victims might benefit from its low toxicity. One of the first to be treated was US President Dwight Eisenhower in September 1955, and warfarin was hailed as a wonderdrug.

But there is also a theory that at a dinner in 1953, Joseph Stalin’s “friends” mixed so much colourless, tasteless warfarin into his food that he died the next day of what the Kremlin said was a “cerebral haemorrhage”.

Warfarin works by increasing the time blood takes to coagulate, or clot, and so my “curdling” – or thrombosis, as the Greeks would say – should just dissolve away without any more intervention from the man with the gel and the gloves.