Tuesday night at 8:30 p.m., my Lympha Press package arrived via UPS. I wanted to wait until I was clear-headed and in daylight to read the directions and figure out how to set it up, so I got up yesterday and unboxed everything.

There was a lot of paperwork that I fortunately don’t have to fill out (Kaylin did that as part of my whole ongoing introductory experience). Enclosed was the motor/pump and the leg “sleeves,” plus a few random attachments to make modifications (if you are only doing therapy on one leg, for instance, there is an outlet blocker for the other one on the front of the pump). There was a paper with a url for an online video on YouTube to give instructions on how to set it up, so I watched that first.

The machine came with pre-sets for both pressure and duration, the duration in my case about an hour, so I didn’t have to touch those dials. Each leg sleeve plugs into the front of the motor box, and the box plugs into an outlet. There’s a switch to turn on the power, and another to start the session, and that’s about it!

Your skin needs to be covered (i.e., long loose pants such as sweats or PJs), and they recommend you also wear socks to prevent sweat from building up inside the sleeves. The sleeves extend out into a boot; you put your foot into that, and then pull up a front-closing zipper from your ankle to the very top, making sure to close the whole thing.

Although they were made to fit me, they are pretty tight at one point along the zipper and I do have to maneuver a little; hopefully, they will be a “self-fulfilling prophecy” and make my legs go down enough so that they will be easier to put on! I was pleased to discover that the legs extend well above the knee, about halfway up the thigh, so my knees, which are currently the location of the greatest amount of swelling, are fully included in the treatment.

I don’t have the ideal location in which to experience the treatment; they recommend sitting with legs elevated, but there is no outlet into which I can plug the motor that is near my bed (there are only two in the bedroom, and one is hidden behind the bureau and the other behind a bookcase, neither of which am I able to move in my current condition), and I don’t (yet) own a recliner, or have a footstool that is the right height to be comfortable with my saggy, low sofa. So for now I am sitting on the sofa with my legs jutting out in front of me.

I have a plan to replace the sofa with a reclining loveseat—in fact, I have one provisionally all picked out (it looks good on the internet) at Living Spaces—but my mobility has been so bad for the past few weeks that I haven’t been able to physically go there to make sure it’s what I want and to order and pay for it and arrange for delivery. Again, hoping this provides enough of a solution to facilitate that and many other trips!

It will be, for sure, an incremental amount of progress. I did two sessions yesterday and one today (so far—I’ll do another tonight), and it’s definitely not the immediate, tangible result for which one would hope, but I think with repeated treatments that things will begin to yield. After last night’s second treatment my legs ached quite a bit, but a short session on my vibration platform made them calm down enough that I could sleep. After today’s first session (the third over all), I did feel like my legs were less swollen (they felt lighter when I walked), but they do seem to tighten back up pretty quickly after the session is done.

It’s going to be really depressing if this doesn’t turn out to be a material aid to improvement because of the lipedema tissue blocking drainage of the lymph. My secret fear is that this will simply move the fluid around and around within a confined space in my legs without sending any of it up to to be processed and eliminated. Kaylin said that once I started treatments, I should be prepared to be visiting the “facilities” regularly to dispose of excess fluid, but I don’t yet notice a big difference there, and it worries me. But…it’s too soon to decide anything for sure, so I’m going to continue the twice-daily treatments and hope that persistence pays off.

Kaylin also reminded me that this is but one therapy in amongst the others that I should continue to pursue—exercise, a proper diet, ingestion of fluids to stay hydrated, use of my vibration platform and massage “gun” will all still remain vital to alleviating this condition.

I feel like my life has been reduced to this one goal of self-care, and that it has turned me into kind of a waste of space. My entire existence feels kind of incestuous: If all I do is sleep, wake up, fix food, exercise, take my pills, and use this pump while watching TV or reading, what’s the point? There is, right now, no room or time for creativity, no sense of purpose, no moving forward or introduction of new elements, places, or people.

My greatest hope is that one day soon my “condition “ won’t be my primary thought or concern or focus. Perhaps that will come true; or it’s possible that I am longing absurdly for a world where magic beans do exist….