I rang a few people and said my goodbyes

Last year 49-year-old Steve Dale came within a whisker of having his leg amputated thanks to a 23-year-old injury. Having already lost his right leg in 2015, he says the Perth-based specialists and surgeons who saved his left leg saved his life at the same time

- KAREN FITTALL

In 1997, I was asleep one night when I heard some kids smashing the windows of my car. I ran out to scare them off and stood on the glass, which cut the sole of my left foot.

“Having been diagnosed with type 1 just before my 10th birthday, I knew how important it was to look after my feet, so I went to A&E the next day and it healed really well.

“Two weeks later, I woke up sweating profusely, and my left foot was the size and colour of a basketball. I took myself to hospital, and was told I had sepsis and that I needed surgery. They went in, did a debridement of my foot to thoroughly clean it out and said I’d be fine.

“A month later, the same thing happened – and it happened six or seven more times over the course of three years. The final time, I was under the care of this really experienced surgeon who was a few months off retiring. He promised that he wouldn’t retire until he’d fixed the problem.

“When he was operating, he found a wound track. He followed it and found a piece of glass that’d been in my foot since 1997 and had worked its way up into my second toe. That was pretty incredible – and such a relief.

“It was 2000 by then, and for the next 20 years, everything was good with my left foot.”

Looking on the right side