You will remember me talking extensively about my new mentor Carol in a previous post in late April. She’s the one who has led the way by example to reduce the swelling in her legs by a combination of wrapping with Fabrifoam, changing her diet, and taking various supplements to level out chemical imbalances, reduce swelling, and feel well enough to exercise, causing a cascading effect of weight loss and more energy. She has gone from total immobility, with daily nurses dropping by and relatives pitching in, to packing a picnic and spending all day at the park at her grandson’s baseball games! To see it seems miraculous until you realize all the hard work and research she has put in over the past two-plus years to get this result.

I jumped right on the Fabrifoam solution and started wrapping my legs at the end of April, and now, less than six weeks later, I can report that the skin on the tops of my feet and around my ankles is flat to the bone and tissue beneath, and my lower legs are greatly reduced in size. I haven’t made a serious effort yet to wrap around and above the knee to start the reduction of the lobes; I have done so twice, and found it both difficult to do on my own (Carol had live-in or close-by family to help her) and painful to wear, so I am continuing to experiment. But I have every confidence that if I persist, I can repeat Carol’s results.

I have been less hasty about following Carol’s lead with the dietary changes and supplements, for several reasons. The first is a personal, ethical one. Some of what Carol (along with many others in our situation) has pursued in the quest to lose weight and regain mobility is the use of a specific diet that is heavily reliant on animal protein. I have been a vegetarian for 35 years now; it began as a health-seeking and cost-saving measure but rapidly evolved into an ethical stance as I learned more about the cruelty with which animals destined for our dinner plates are treated, and the intelligence and empathy with humans shown by many of those breeds. So beef, pork, and mutton, alias cows, pigs, and sheep, won’t be appearing on my dinner plate ever.

When you become vegetarian or vegan, the first thing you learn is to read food labels in search of hidden ingredients that would negate all your efforts to eat cruelty-free. You find out that things like “gelatin” or “rennet” are sourced from the death of animals and you eliminate those food products from your diet along with the half-pound of ground round that is the obvious culprit. This is equally true when using supplements. The ones that have helped Carol so much, regrettably for those of us who would love to benefit likewise, have collagen in them, which is harvested from cows, so I am unwilling to take them. I likewise won’t be drinking bone broth, another new and potent remedy for people with health issues and/or inflammation. So some avenues she swears by are banned for me by my dietary choices.

An extenuating circumstance to this one is that because I take a permanent daily dose of blood thinners, some of the ingredients are forbidden to me because of interactions or accentuation, and I want a second opinion from a doctor before taking something that could imperil my health.

The second reason, less important but definitely a significant one, is cost. The companies who make these supplements don’t sell them cheap. And they probably shouldn’t. As Carol has pointed out in posts she has made about their efficacy, the people who market these products have done a lot of research and have combined ingredients that, separately, would cost you as an individual both a lot of money and a lot of ingenuity to track down. And you would also have to understand the science of combining them in the correct sequence and quantity to make them optimally effective.

I have no doubt that these specific products have helped Carol, because she has talked extensively about the difference they have made, and I believe both her words and the photos with which she backs them up. But as a person on a fixed income who has spent thousands of dollars over the past few years seeking to short-cut a “cure” by changing my gut biome or whatever, I can tell you that coming up with a couple hundred extra dollars a month is a push (especially since I had to quit UCLA), so I would need to be absolutely certain, beforehand, that the expense was worth it—that these supplements would do for me what they have done for Carol.

My plan has been, therefore, to go to this new vascular doctor to have all the blood tests done that would hopefully pinpoint my specific issues, whether they are thyroid-based, having to do with estrogen and progesterone, or cortisol-related (or who knows, all three?), and proceed from there to examine what would be the correct course of treatment.

In the meantime, however, I made a random, thoughtless comment under a Facebook post in which Carol was lauding a particularly company’s product, remarking on how much it cost and how hard that would be to afford. I received back a private message from her, going on at length about the information I just mentioned—how much the individual ingredients would cost, how hard it was to know in what way to combine them, etc. and from that standpoint they were not costly, they were essential.

Rather than explain what I am doing in terms of research before committing myself to some regime, I simply apologized to Carol and said I would not post anything like that again in the public forum. Because here’s the catch: If you send other people to the company from which you buy your supplements, you yourself get discounts on your own supply. And Carol is relying on those discounts to get what she needs for herself and her family. After everything she has done for me, I don’t want to imperil her progress or livelihood by rash remarks, so I made that commitment to stick to my lane and keep my comments to myself.

Apparently, however, my apology and my word that I wouldn’t do it again didn’t inspire enough confidence in Carol or alleviate her anger with me, because last night I went to Messenger to tell her something about my Fabrifoam wrapping experience and ask a question, only to discover “that person is not available on Messenger.” Since Messenger went through a recent series of changes, I first thought I had just done something wrong, but when I switched over to Facebook I discovered that Carol is no longer accessible there, either: She has blocked me.

This makes me really sad. I am so grateful to her for the introduction to Fabrifoam and other supplemental wraps, her discussions with me about food, supplements, and lifestyle, her sharing of videos and links, and her constant encouragement that if I would be both persistent and consistent, I could achieve what she has done.

I am grateful to the point that I have already made it my response to pass along those tips and links to others with our same issues; I just had an hour-long discussion two nights ago with a friend whose boyfriend is suffering from lipoedema, lymphedema, and lymphorrhea, and desperately needed all the information I learned from Carol. It made me so happy to know that she had started this flow of healing information to me and I could continue feeding the flow downhill to the next person. I wanted, last night, to report that conversation to her, but now that upchannel is closed.

I’m writing all of this to say a couple of things: One, I hope that Carol sees it so that she can know how grateful I am for all the advice she has given and the good will she has shown me. Two, I hope it will prompt others to ask me for the same help if they need it, because I will be happy to share. And three, maybe it will open that dialogue back up between me and Carol, someday.