A MAN in “horrendous pain” has had his knee operation cancelled seven times.

Chris Gibbons, from Hove, needs surgery to clean and replace his infected, arthritic knee. He has been waiting for the procedure for almost a year – but says the NHS Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath keeps cancelling the operation to make way for emergency surgery.

Now Peter Kyle, the Labour MP for Hove and Portslade, wants to raise Chris’s case in Parliament. He said his treatment had been “beyond a disgrace”, and wants the Health Secretary Matt Hancock to personally apologise.

Time and again, Mr Gibbons has been prepared for surgery, wearing a gown and on a trolley, only to be told his operation has been postponed. The most recent cancellation was on Monday.

He said: “I was ready to go under the knife, and I just broke down in tears. I’ve gone from anger to frustration to complete breakdown. The pain is more than I can bear.

“Imagine being hit in the knee with a sledgehammer or kicked in the kneecap playing football. It’s twenty times worse than that.”

He said a junior doctor tasked with removing a “500ml bottle of green slime” from the joint described the infection as “the worst he had ever seen”.

Mr Gibbons said: “The pain is horrendous, and as it’s cancelled again and again the bone is deteriorating and the infection is getting worse.

“I’m hooked on morphine and Tramadol. The doses I take would knock a horse out, and I can’t function after midday. The pain gets too much. My day revolves around lying in bed, and I’ve lost a year of my life.

“I need this operation soon. The bug in my leg seals itself like a little hedgehog so antibiotics just bounce off it. They need to cut my leg open again to get at it.”

Mr Gibbons claims he has been “left in limbo”. Since 2018, he has undergone blood tests, ultrasound scans and X-rays, been “passed around three hospitals” and admitted to A&E.

Earlier this year, he said he “nearly died” after being taken into intensive care with sepsis. He was housebound in a wheelchair for four months.

He said doctors have now told him they may have to amputate his leg or fuse the bones in the limb straight.

He is now on crutches with a plastic space-filler and a cement joint rather than a permanent knee replacement.

He misses swimming in the sea, and spending quality time with his partner.

“She has to hear me crying in pain”, he said. “A 53-year-old man, breaking down crying. It’s terrible.

“When I was taken into intensive care, I brought my partner into hospital and she broke down crying too. I was begging the consultant – ‘please don’t let me go home, please give me a bed’.

“And I’m a priority now, apparently.

He said: “There are three or four surgeons to see hundreds of patients. When I finally got to see someone to find out why I’d been let home, a consultant met me for 58 seconds.

“I know the NHS is up the wall, and I know there are people in worse positions than myself, but surely they can do something – even just to get rid of me.”

Dr George Findlay, chief medical officer at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the Princess Royal, apologised to Chris.

He said he was “sorry for Mr Gibbons’ experience”.

He added: “We fully understand the distress and frustration caused when an operation has to be postponed as well as the impact that decision can have on our patients.

“We will only ever postpone an appointment to maintain the highest standards of safety and quality for all our patients and when this happens we always try to rebook them as soon as possible. We are also working hard to improve our service so that both urgent and planned care can always be delivered in a timely way.”

Peter Kyle is championing Chris’s case. He said: “I’ve been helping Chris since his second or third cancellation. This is now his seventh one.

“But Chris has been in considerable pain, and he’s severely debilitated. It’s a serious operation. He has to psychologically prepare. His family go to a lot of inconvenience, taking time off work and preparing for him to come home.

“The NHS now lacks capacity so severely that all resources are diverted to deal with emergencies.

“I’m trying to find a way to raise this in Parliament – ideally for the health secretary to answer or in Prime Minister’s Questions.”

Mr Kyle said health secretary Matt Hancock should “personally apologise” and “promise that within a year, this will not be happening to people like Chris.”

Mr Hancock did not respond to The Argus’s request for comment.