Just Lymphing Along…

Wednesday, March 19th — Today, after Dr. Klein used the robot on my feet, I noticed little indentations in the skin and underlying flesh. I commented on the edema, wondering if it would go away eventually. He gave me a brief mini-lecture on how fluids like blood travel through the body, via the circulatory system — a closed system with the heart as the central pump. In other words, blood is pumped to all parts of the body by means of the arteries, and returns to the heart through the veins. Lymph is a clear fluid that is squeezed from blood plasma — basically, it’s blood that has no red cells.  The lymphatic system is a one-way system rather than a circulatory system. Lymph collects in many little sacs throughout the body, often near the joints, and drains out through little one-way valves.  That’s what is causing the edema in my feet — an over-collection of lymph, made worse by gravity. (This is massively oversimplified, by the way. If you’re interested in more about lymph and the lymphatic system, go to Google.  It’ll give you several websites of varying complexity that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about lymph.)

Dr. Klein suggested that my physical therapist might perform a lymphatic massage to help drain the excess lymph out of my feet.  It’s a simple massage using a “milking” movement of the hands, from the feet back toward the legs.  If my artificial hips permitted me to reach my feet, which they do not, I could easily do it myself.  Maybe I could do it by doing my regular PT leg-lifts, then bending the knees back.  I’ll try that and report back to Dr. Klein.

He has worked on my shoulders with the robot three times now, and that feels very good too. I notice that I’m able to tolerate higher levels of pressure from the robot than I was at the beginning. At first, it was 10 pounds of pressure at the neck, and 15 pounds at shoulder level. Farther down the back, where the vertebrae are larger, he used 20 pounds.  Now Dr. Klein starts at 15 pounds on the neck, moves to 20 around the shoulders, and 25 lower down the back. Nothing has ever been painful! The worst it’s been during an adjustment, I would say, is the feeling that my teeth are chattering when he starts on the neck. I guess this must be how the pavement feels when the workmen start jackhammering! And even that isn’t really very bad at all. I do feel pretty stiff and sore the next morning, briefly; but then, it’s hard to tell how much of that pain is caused by the adjustments and how much is just the regular garden-variety stiffness and soreness I’ve been living with for years.