16 Sep 2025 Community

Leslie’s Story: Compassion, Care and how The Kirkwood gave him hope for the future

At 87 years old, Leslie Thorp has endured more than his share of health struggles. Living with heart failure, a broken hip, and recurring infections, he began to feel as though life was becoming an endless cycle of hospital visits, tests and pills. “At one stage you feel like all you’re doing is waiting to die,” he admits. But Leslie’s outlook changed the moment he walked through the doors of The Kirkwood.

Leslie who lives near Holmfirth has faced more than his fair share of health challenges. Living with heart failure for many years, his condition gradually worsened, leaving him feeling drained and hopeless.

On his care journey so far Leslie said: “I’ve had heart failure for quite a while and it’s obviously deteriorated. Things have got worse and become more difficult as it has. I became more susceptible to other things like having a fall, which I did just over 18 months ago. I fell and broke my left hip and had to have a partial hip replacement. At the time, the hospital said I was recovering very well, better than expected.”

Just as he began to feel stronger, more complications followed: “Later that year I developed a chest infection and ended up in hospital for a week. I was on an intravenous drip of antibiotics. After a week they almost worked, so they sent me home with tablets, but it took me a long time to recover properly, if I ever did. I just wonder whether some of this now is the remnants of that, because I didn’t recover properly. Maybe something else has developed, I don’t know.”

It was during one of his consultations that Leslie’s doctor suggested The Kirkwood: “One of the doctors that I see suggested this place to me,” Leslie recalls: “He said about The Kirkwood having a very good reputation. He explained to me that it wasn’t an end of life hospice, it was more about looking at your symptoms and trying to improve your medication. And in my experience, being here for just four or five days, that’s exactly what’s happened.”

For months, Leslie had been struggling with swelling in his legs, inflammation in his chest and the breathlessness that came with it: “That’s been my major problem of recent months,” he explains. “The doctors have been trying with a cocktail of pills, varying them one way and another, to try and get something that works to reduce the swelling, and nothing has worked. I came in here and they tried a different approach altogether. They put me on a machine which puts the medication just under your skin. And that definitely worked because within four days the inflammation in my legs has gone right down, back to normal, and I’m breathing easier.”

The transformation has been more than physical: “So all I can see from my visit here is positivity. That’s all I can see. At one stage you feel like all you’re doing is waiting to die. I’m normally more positive than that, but when nothing changes and you’re just given another cocktail of pill’s week after week, it becomes a mental strain. You feel as though there’s no progress being made. But here, I’ve seen progress straightaway.”

His family have also noticed the change, and the environment with The Kirkwood has reassured them: “They’ve been quite surprised at how nice it is here, how comfortable everything is for the patient, which is obviously reassuring to them. And of course, the fact that they can come in more or less anytime they want makes such a difference. Some of my family are still working, but my daughter and her husband are retired and they’ve done a wonderful job of looking after me since I broke my hip. They’ve spent so much time with me, I couldn’t ask for more. For them to see me here, in such a supportive place, has been a real comfort.”

For Leslie, the hospice has been a revelation: “I don’t know that I see it as a hospital. There are plenty of nurses around and if you need anything, someone’s there within seconds. In that respect, it is like a hospital, but certainly a very efficient hospital put it that way. The doctors and nurses can’t give you enough time. They don’t rush anything, that makes such a difference.”

He admits he misunderstood what a hospice was before he came: “I didn’t know about The Kirkwood. I knew nothing at all about it. I suppose I might have had a bit of a misunderstanding of hospices, really which I think probably a lot of people do. We imagine they’re places to go to die. And I think that’s a misconception. What I’ve experienced here proves that.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise for Leslie has been the speed of his recovery: “I can’t believe how quickly everything’s happened. Within four or five days, I feel as though I’m back to what I was maybe two years ago. When the nurse unbandaged one of my legs this morning, I couldn’t believe it. That leg had been swollen for months, and suddenly it looked like it did a long time ago.”

When he discovered how much of The Kirkwood’s care is funded by local people, Leslie was deeply moved: “It just shows how generous the public are, really. After what I’ve experienced, I’d be quite happy to make a monthly donation whatever I could afford. I wouldn’t be against that at all. People don’t realise what a difference this place makes until they’ve needed it.”

For Leslie, The Kirkwood has given him more than better health it has given him hope: “It’s been nice to be able to share my story. If you’re in a situation like mine, where you need extra support and your medication isn’t working, I’d say don’t hesitate to contact The Kirkwood to come here. You don’t know what you’re missing until you’ve been.”