Lymphedema is, to put it simply, chronic swelling. It happens when there is a blockage of the lymph nodes, making it difficult for fluid to drain properly.
There are a lot of causes for this disease, including parasitic infection, injury or trauma, radiation therapy, surgery, tumors, and skin infections. It is common for women who have been treated for breast cancer to develop lymphedema in their arms. Mine happens to be a result of injury.
Unfortunately, there is no cure for lymphedema. However, there are many treatment options, such as compression, manual lymph drainage (MLD), and range-of-motion exercises. There can be complications due to this condition so it’s very important to keep up care!!
(Information from GoogleHealth)
This blog is for lymphedema people of all ages, but i believe younger sufferers will feel especially at ease with these discussions because of your age. Plus the fact that you have suffered with this all your life. Also benefiting from this will be family members. It will shed an understanding of the painful self esteem issues that lymphedema people silently carry with them everyday. There is nothing more heart wrenching than watching a loved one suffer! Alexa, thank you for exposing your pain and triunph in the hope of helping others. You have a very generous heart :)
Ah…”silently”?! Hi, Doreen, I’m Barbara, and I gather you’re related to Alexa. Mother? Sister? Cousin? Aunt? I sound like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan here; my apologies. I don’t carry issues silently, to the dismay of plenty of people I know, but tough luck to them, I have a dozen (literally) chronic conditions, several of them potentially life-threatening, others merely intermittently painful or agonizing and/or disabling. Primary lymphedema is one of them. I thought Alexa’s was primary (meaning hereditary) as well, but apparently it’s secondary to an injury. It’s no fun either way! Most people know nothing about lymphedema, so they tell us to just keep quiet about it. When we learn what we have and what it can do to us, that’s when we get noisy about it. Silent sufering does us no good at all…in fact, it does just the opposite!
New to all this! Have MS. No one told me this is what I have but need info on how to deal with sever swelling of my foot. Should my GP be the one diagnosing this?