Study aims to find why missing leg still hurts 18.02.2006 By ANGIE KAY
ALAN Lemon has lived with pain in his left leg for 50 years. This is despite having the leg amputated half a century ago. The 80-year-old from Chancellor Park is now considering joining an Australian study looking into phantom limb pain known to affect amputees to varying degrees, but still a mystery to the medical world. Mr Lemon lost his leg when he was shot in the calf while trying to catch two dingoes which were killing sheep on his Roma property. "I had set a gun trap for the dingoes but one morning I deviated from my routine and accidentally walked into the trap myself," he said. "The wound developed gas gangrene and they had to take the leg from above the knee. The doctors told me I wouldn't live past 50 but now I am 80."
And while Mr Lemon has been able to live a full and busy life running three farms and travelling extensively overseas, it has been a half century of pain. "The pain is not there all the time, but it happens often enough for me to develop my own pain scale," Mr Lemon said. "And there are other times when I don't feel pain but there is definitely some feeling there." In order to find some relief for the pain Mr Lemon was being admitted to hospital on Thursday where he will undergo a barrage of tests and trial some new painkillers.
"There are times when my left leg is poking out and I can see the foot but the foot is not there," he said. "There are days when the pain is not so bad and you can put up with it. Those days it feels like the leg is in warm bath water.
"But there are other days when the pain is serious and it feels as if someone is trying to saw through the leg. There are days when it feels like someone with a sharp knife is running it around the edge of the stump."
He said the more he used his leg the less trouble he had with phantom nerve feeling or pain. "The busier you are the less pain you feel."
