I’m so vein

A casual remark by her husband about the veins in her legs turned Fiona Golfar from a perfectly contented 50-something into a crazed insomniac ‘imprisoned’ in a pair of compression stockings. Was the pain worth the gain?

Fiona Golfar discovers the latest way to rid yourself of those troublesome varicose veins

SOMEWHERE IN THE middle of last summer, while on holiday in Cornwall, I was having one of those rare optimum moments. I felt that my weight – a constant struggle – was under control and that life was good. I mentioned to my husband as we were preparing to set off to the beach, me wearing a knee-length dress, that I was quite pleased with the shape of things – literally – and he said, ‘Yes, it’s all good, but have you noticed the back of your legs?’ I heard the needle scratch the record. ‘Obviously I haven’t seen the back of my legs. It’s not something I think to do all that often.’

Immediately hysterical, I tried desperately to swivel and see what he was talking about. ‘Snakes,’ he murmured, nervously backing out of the bedroom.

They were back: the nasty cluster of wormy invaders climbing up the back of my calves. I hadn’t noticed; I had been too busy dealing with the myriad tiny daily disasters that confront me just looking at my front view in the mirror.

I tend not to give a lot of thought to my legs. Who does? My mother used to say there was only one thing wrong with hers, which was that she had two of them. I have perfectly average ones, though I don’t have much cellulite. I would have liked to have ankles, but hey ho, you can’t always get what you want. And anyway, I would never ever, ever, go out with bare legs in anything that was shorter than mid-calf. The dream of having well-tapered, flawless legs like those New York socialites or the olive-skinned beauties one sees on Instagram hopping off a private jet in hot pants at Coachella, the kind of women who have never even heard of such a thing as a spider vein, was never to be my reality.

I called my friend Olivia Falcon, who has just launched a clever business called The Editor’s List, a cosmetic-beauty concierge service where Falcon uses her vast experience as the health and beauty editor of Tatler to connect her clients to the very best surgeons and cosmetic experts. It bypasses the onerous and often disappointing task of browsing the internet or asking a whole load of people who might not have the best information. This service evaluates everyone from GPS to brow tattooists and everything in between. Falcon fast tracked me (something else I’m very keen on) to Professor Mark Whiteley, whose clinic in central London offers a ‘walk-in, walk-out’ state-of-theart treatment for all things veiny.

I know about varicose veins. After I had children in my 30s I noticed a few on my left leg, which I had removed. That was 20 years ago and it involved an operation where the vein from behind my left knee was literally ‘stripped’ out of the leg. Back then, there was no ultrasound scanning done on veins: the surgeon just looked at the offending area and made a decision about what to do. It was believed that simply stripping the vein from the leg while the patient was under general anaesthetic was enough to prevent it from recurring. Wrong! It turns out that the veins do actually grow back.

Prof Whiteley is a friendly, nice-looking chap in his late 40s with the self-belief of a rock star, and rightly so. His clinic is regarded as a world leader (he treats up to 40 patients a month). I found listening to him both immensely reassuring and utterly bewildering as he threw out phrases like ‘endovenous surgery’ and ‘foam sclerotherapy’ – both of which he could apparently tell I needed just from a glance at the backs of my legs, groaning at the evidence of yet more ‘old-fashioned work’ he was going to have to fix. To back up his observations with science, Whiteley handed me over to his associate Judy Holdstock, an expert in duplex ultrasound examination of veins.

I stood on a low step and Holdstock asked me to lift one foot, thus putting pressure on the leg she was scanning. Slathering my leg in gel, she ran a wand over my skin. As she arrived at key veins she gently squeezed and released the area to see on the monitor how the blood was flowing. She was clearly fascinated and it was contagious. I too was gripped, watching my veins do their thing on her screen as though it was an episode of ER. She scanned me from top to bottom, clucking and tutting with enthusiasm as she encountered offending tributaries and making markings on me with a fat felt-tip pen. Finally, she did a transvaginal scan, to make sure that I didn’t have any varicose veins in my pelvis or in the walls of my vagina, which is apparently far more common than you might think. According to The Whiteley Clinic’s findings, pelvic venous reflux – sounds attractive, doesn’t it? – has been proven to be a rarely reported but major contributing cause of reoccurring varicose veins. (Here, rather than squeeze me to monitor how the blood flows, she asked me to cough. I was praying that was all I was going to do, what with all the prodding and coughing and moving things around down there. Imagine my relief when she told me that there was no sign of blocked veins.)

Varicose veins are the nasty bulging tributaries of the major veins in the legs. They are the result of the valves not working properly