Among these is the tendency to develop fatty tissue in the breast area and around the waist. Boys with Klinefelter tend to be taller than average, and sometimes have some mild learning difficulties. Many of these problems are caused by a lack of the male hormone testosterone. This lack of testosterone also makes it very unlikely that XXY men will be able to father children. Testosterone injections can help with some, but not all, of the problems associated with Klinefelter syndrome. Although Klinefelter syndrome is caused by an abnormal number of chromosomes, it is not inherited, so the risk of it occurring again within a family is very small.

You can find out more from the Klinefelter Organisation, PO Box 128, Netherton, Wakefield WF4 4XY, or on the web at .uk.. “I ‘ll never ever forget one tiny nurse looking up at me and telling me to get on with my work, when I was actually holding someone’s hand who was sobbing his heart out.” It may have happened 20 years ago, but this is Jo Metcalfe’s abiding memory of working as a nurse for the NHS “I remember feeling quite disillusioned.” Metcalfe pauses “Well, not so much disillusioned as very saddened. I went into nursing because of contact and patient care, but there didn’t seem to be much time for that.” Metcalfe is 36, and hasn’t worked in an environment of “orthodox medicine” (her terminology) since then. Instead, she is a natural health practitioner: a purveyor of “holistic care” who treats patients with forms of health care that she sees as viable alternatives to drugs This type of practice is not unusual, of course. Aromotherapy, homeopathic remedies and reflexology are not regarded as weird and wacky, as they might have been 20 years ago. What is different about Metcalfe, though, is that she had a se

“I’ll never ever forget one tiny nurse looking up at me and telling me to get on with my work, when I was actually holding someone’s hand who was sobbing his heart out.” It may have happened 20 years ago, but this is Jo Metcalfe’s abiding memory of working as a nurse for the NHS “I remember feeling quite disillusioned.” Metcalfe pauses “Well, not so much disillusioned as very saddened.

The diagnosis came about by accident, when she asked a family friend who was a GP to take a blood test to check that she wasn’t mildly anaemic. When the results came back, her haemoglobin levels were at seven, when they should have been somewhere between nine and 12 Had this gone undetected, she would have died. “They were absolutely staggered, when they realised my blood count, that I was still capable of working,” she says. Her disease was deemed incurable, and at the age of 19 everything in Metcalfe’s life became secondary to trying to survive.It would be too easy to mark this as the starting point for Metcalfe’s search for alternative treatment. Technically it was not: she was immediately admitted to hospital, and began an intensive routine within the NHS – or, as she calls it, on the merry-go-round of orthodox medicine. The ride wasn’t much fun: as well as steroids and other strong drugs, she took two types of birth-control pill to stop her periods (otherwise the bleeding from menstruation would have been difficult to stop) and had regular blood transfusions. For the majority of the 18 months after diagnosis, Metcalfe was in hospital.