Yesterday, was the third day we visited a lymphedema therapist that my mom was sent to by her doctor for treatment. After unwrapping her garments, doing measurements and doing quick lymph drainage, she started wrapping quickly her enormously swollen feet back. While doing that, she kept saying that apparently this treatment is not working and she is ready do give up and will report that in her medical notes and my mom will need to find someone else to do her treatments. My mom’s half an hour in therapy was almost over and the knock on the door and a voice reported to the therapist that the next patient is in room number 14. Three previous years, I was draining her feet myself after work to late at night and if one does this drainage earnestly, to make a difference in size, softness and skin appearance one has to spend up to 8 hours massaging her feet. She is also allergic to many thing the therapists used, for example foam gives her skin rash and cotton things are good for her. The cleanliness of the therapists desires improvement since lymphedema such illness that any infection in legs is life threatening, but things used from the floor and uncovered bed surfaces, even from objects she stepped with her feet soles on. Measuring and typing on computer that from the computer keys infection can be transferred to legs is not good. The therapist mentions that my mom is excessively preoccupied with cleanliness when she asks about those things, things that her skin doctor asked to watch for. She also develops scary blisters, if my mom legs become too swollen. they break and become wounds, my mom gets scared to go to wound clinic, at times, I become an emergency doctor for her. Her toe nails become ingrown with lymphedema and I need to do a surgery with couple of plus 4 size glass lenses to carefully cut her ingrown nails. She develops corns, hard skin, broken skin and blisters on the soles of her feet that I constantly cut too. She has extremely dry and flaky skin that I wash and treat with creams and ointments. I bend my back soften that I, myself was told to go to a physical therapy for my back pain. My back becoming round, since I take care for my mother’s illness for over 15 years. My fiancee, at first said that he thought it is cute that I take care of my mom but it takes a lot from a relationship and left me, at work, I have to miss days because she might be sick or I might be exhausted. No one pays me for my enormous work and sacrifice in my personal life and my health. I am an only daughter and my mother saved my life not once, I have to pay her back. My health is going downhill. I do not sleep enough often only 4 hours. My memory suffers, I started to have high blood pressure and breathing problems in the morning, as well as horrible migraine headaches. There is no help for us even to hire someone there are no trained lymphedema specialists and we are on fixed income already. Outpatient clinics there are very few, busy with breast cancer patients who develop lymphedema in arms. Legs lymphedema, like my moms, caused by a skin doctor who gave her an antibiotic that she was allergic too, is very rare and almost no one treats it and they pass her to one another. At the end of their short treatment, her care is heavily lays on me. I am an only daughter. My father is in his 80es, experienced 5 heart attacks, a handicap himself with torn muscles and ligaments in his arms and with four stents in his heart can not do much. I have to put her feet into a car and from the car, I have to lift her feet putting her to bed at night. The lymphedema specialists treat her for a short periods of time then send her to buy special Velcro support for her feet that quickly becomes unusable. On one such leg support she spent $500, the second one, she had no money to buy, I spend myself over $2500. I am a substitute teacher that earns very little and even less so now when a lot of teachers were laid off and we working one half of the days we used to work all previous years. We need help!
