Gift of RA

The last few weeks have been very interesting and informative – ever since my dermatologist told me I have long-term edema in my legs with scar tissue, I have learned a lot.  The reason I knew about it was last November I had a car door hit me in my leg, near the ankle.  The sore didn’t get worse, but didn’t heal and I asked my dermatologist about.  she called it an ulcer and sent me to Wound Care to have it taken care of – it took a few weeks.  It resulted in having my left lower leg wrapped up in bandages changed every week.  Consequently, I couldn’t take a shower because I couldn’t let it get wet.  And since I was also doing the nose surgery, a shower was definitely out of the question.

The sore healed but I didn’t have any compression socks to use to keep the swelling down.  So once again, I am all wrapped up again, still looking at compression socks that will work.  The first ones I bought turned out to be too short and were too tight at the top – too bad because they were quite colorful.

That was a blow because my right leg is also swollen, so I really needed to find something soon because they think I may be able to take the wrapping off my leg this coming week.  I have been looking on Google for several days and I know Sockwell is a good brand.  I found some on Amazon with medium compression in black and also a stripe.  They are not cheap, but instead of $25.00, I bought them for $17.99 and they arrived on Friday afternoon.

Saturday I tried to put one on and by George, I was able to do it by myself!  During my rehab stay for the hip, the CNA had to put them on and take them off for me – I suspect they were firm or very firm compression.  I wore them all day Saturday and was able to walk around 3 shops without feeling really tired or sore.  My right knee has been the one that really gets me, but everything has worked rather well.  There must be something to the support as well as just compression to prevent edema.  It has been most interesting to find myself noticing a difference.    The other pair I bought was a grey chevron stripe – similar to this:

Not quite so fashionable, but if the black ones work, I figure these will also because they are the same size.  I decided on the Medium/Large just to be sure they come up far enough.  The trouble is they go by shoe size and calf circumference but don’t show how tall they are.  So it is a by guess, by golly to figure it out.  I am thinking of returning the too small ones and try a plus size to see if it will work.  If it doesn’t, I am not out a whole lot.

The other bit of news is our new big screen tv.  The one we had was Mom and Dad’s for quite a long time and it was dying.  It was still working but had intermittent troubles and the nice young man who hooked up the tv said he would recycle it without charge.  We also had another old one down stairs and he took that yesterday to where we bought the new one.  We decided to keep the little one in our bedroom for a while.

Eddie has ben talking about buying a new big screen for a year or more – he finally had enough money put away so we could pay for it – we put it on the credit card and will have the cash when the bill comes.  It is 42″ and almost fills up the table we use for the tv – one of these days we will find an entertainment center so we can have our DVDs stored in it.  We also bought a DVD player, a Blu-ray even though we have regular DVDs.  It’s also a Smart TV – whatever that means –  it remains to be seen who is smarter.

Eddie bought a Blu-ray DVD yesterday so we could see how it looks – the new Star Wars movie.  Interesting.  We are still getting used to it and how it works – still seems strange to watch.  The tv is ultra high-definition – though we don’t have high def on our satellite company – no doubt costs extra. So we will struggle a long for a while, but now we can watch DVDs in the living room instead of retreating to the bedroom on a small tv.

Ain’t technology wonderful!!!

This entry was posted on April 17, 2016 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.