The biggest enemy of self-care when it comes to lipoe-lymphedema isn’t physical tolerance so much as mental disposition. Yesterday was a good day, and I was able to think clearly enough to come to the realization that I have fallen down on the job and my recent poor physical response is a result of that.

It’s been 11 days since my Zoom appointment with Dr. Gallagher, a meeting in which she emphasized that while the vibration platform and the lympha-press could be assets, my new best friend should be my massage gun; but I had yet to act on that. Eleven days! This is what happens when other things (like doctor’s appointments, organizing sessions, cleaning ladies, and sheer exhaustion) intervene in the self-care routine, giving me sufficient quantities of both distraction and stress that I focus on them to the exclusion of everything else.

The point of self-care is to establish a routine and stick to it, but it’s hard, particularly for a person who is recently self-diagnosed with ADD, a diagnosis that would have been obvious decades ago if anyone was watching.

But, as I said, yesterday was a good day, for several reasons, the first being that I got the news from the urologist that the kidney stone is no longer with us! This means I won’t have to have another surgery, I will simply go to her office to get the stent removed and that will be an end to this chapter. My appointment is for next Thursday, so what I immediately focused on was the need to minimize my lymphedema enough to be able to drive to that appointment, and my previously foggy brain began to think about that.

After my session with Dr. Gallagher, one thing I did was decide to order the Beltwell brand of compression wraps for my thighs and lower legs. I had purchased some velcro-type wraps in the past, and they worked well, but my right leg grew too big to use one; the Beltwell brand promises that they will fit people with a calf size up to 36 inches and mine currently measures 33, so I hastily bought a set before I outgrew those as well!

I ordered both the lower legs and the thigh wraps, and they arrived on my porch Thursday night, so yesterday I tried them out.

I think the thigh wraps will work, but only in a limited capacity. I can leave them lying on the sofa and, when I am sure I am settling in for a few hours of TV viewing, I can put them on. The problem with them is that the lipoedema has ballooned the top eight inches or so of my hips out at the sides like half-basketballs, so I can’t pull the thigh wraps high enough over the top of those for them to stay up and in place when I walk. But if I put them on when I’m seated, they will do some work to reduce lymphadema.

The calf wraps, on the other hand, are marvelous. They have plenty of room for overlap, and can be fastened snugly and, unlike the others I bought, they don’t slide down in the course of the day. Because of their much simpler closure system, if they start to feel loose (which could be because of movement but one hopes is a result of fluid reduction!) you can simply tighten them down again, without removing and re-wrapping them. I’m thrilled with these and plan to use them every day.

Last night, I went to use my vibration platform before bed; I use the night-time session as a way to relax the legs and “take the twitches out,” because there is a certain amount of tension and enervation provoked by stumping around on fluid-laden legs all day, and sometimes that must be released or sleep isn’t going to arrive. That’s when I discovered that I hadn’t used the platform the night before (I was too tired) or yesterday in the morning (forgot), and my extension cord that allows me to plug in the platform was missing. The cleaning ladies who came on Thursday apparently unplugged and removed it while vacuuming the floor, and didn’t put it back. Ten long minutes later, I discovered it underneath my lympha-press sleeves on the sofa, plugged it in and used it, and that’s when my eye lit on my neglected massage gun sitting on the coffee table and I realized that I had not changed my routine since my talk with Dr. Gallagher.

This morning, therefore, I got up, retrieved the MG from the living room, and proceeded to use it on all the fibrotic fat pockets and rolls and protrusions on my legs for about 15 minutes per leg. I started off on a low setting, since I am just beginning, as Dr. Melissa said, to “tenderize the meat,” and it was fully as painful as I expected, and more so in some spots.

I am following the directions she gave me to run it back and forth over the rolls and also across the seams between them, to try to break down the barriers between the pockets. I also used it not only on my basketball hips but around both sides into the lower back area, which was excruciating while it was happening, but felt great afterwards. After finishing, I immediately put on my Beltwell calf wraps, and came in the studio to write this.

I don’t know how, exactly, to counteract the effects of brain fog on my daily routine; Kirsten, of course, has scientific statements about how long it takes to develop a habit, and encourages me to do things like setting an alarm or timer (one has to remember to do that in order to do the other! is my response). Placing the assistive devices in plain view works some of the time; notes pasted up in various places can be helpful; but ultimately I’m going to have to adopt the Nike motto as my own and “Just do it,” temporary lack of mental acuity notwithstanding. Perhaps, if improvements begin to accumulate between the use of the MG and the Beltwells, it will become easier to embrace the authors of the improvement!