I am so so sorry for the lack of posts lately but last year was truely a busy one for me. I won’t bore you with the details, but please know that 2016 was one helluva busy year, and now, during the somewhat calm period of 2017 I am using this time to do an update on my progress since I know 2017 is going to be just as busy, if not more!
The last time I wrote was in 2015 to give some insight on my incision scars and how they’ve healed. Since then, I returned to Dr Rapprich for a second round of tumescent liposuction surgery to treat Lipedema. Please note that the following procedure occurred in August 2015.
So! First thing’s first — WHY did I go back for another round of surgery? Good question. Well, I suppose I really could have left my body the way it is, and I am by no means unappreciative of the results I had. However, when I first went for the consultation with Dr Rapprich, we both agreed that the safest first manoeuvre was to be conservative in how much fat was removed — better safe than sorry, right? And I’m sure I would have left things as they were, however, due to good fortune I found myself with enough money to be able to afford the surgery again. So it was a matter of choice — pay off some debt, go on a holiday and spoil myself a little or; have some more surgery performed to treat Lipedema?
Having grown up being very slim and skinny, life took a rather dramatic turn when Lipedema started to develop in my teens. In that most insecure and emotionally vulnerable period of my life I had suddenly become the skinny girl with a fat secret. I had to dress accordingly, hide my legs and really alter my life in a way so I could maintain my former identity of being skinny. This insecure has sadly never left me and I am still quietly worried about the imbalance between my upper and lower half.
So I booked myself in for another round of surgery with Dr Rapprich. Coincidentally, around the same time I received an email from someone who had discovered this blog (Hello N!). After a few email and Skype exchanges, we agreed that we could go to Frankfurt, live together, and have the surgery performed on the same day.
We hired an AirBnB in Frankfurt city for the week. What I found super funny was, just outside our apartment building in the middle of the city, was this statue of a woman with large Lipedema-looking legs!
The clinic is located in Bad Soden am Taunus, about a half an hour train ride from Frankfurt city (I can strongly recommend using public transport in Germany, it’s excellent!). It is a modern and new building that is clearly of a higher quality standard than a public hospital. The clinic itself is located near the entrance, it is small and quaint but also very modern and squeaky clean! I felt like I was in good hands.
Well, there’s really not that much I can say about the surgery that I haven’t already covered in my previous post. Things went very much in a similar fashion, the only difference being that this time I was also having my upper calves done. In total I had the following areas treated: lower calves, upper calves, outer thighs and buttocks.
The surgery went by so well that I literally walked out of the operating room and straight into the waiting area as I waited for my Lipedema buddy to go in for her surgery. Since it took some time, I was even able to walk down to the hospitals cafeteria and get myself some lunch — strange to think I had just had surgery! After lunch, I took a walk around the hospital and took some of the following pictures for your viewing pleasure:
And so, for the next 4 days my Lipedema buddy and I took care of each other, assisting each other in changes bandages and dressing, with blood-thinning injections (okay, so she only helped me with that since I can’t even look at needles!) and general day-to-day support post-liposuction surgery.
Thus concludes my SECOND procedure to treat lipedema with tumescent liposuction. This operation was conducted in August 2015, and to those who are interested, I will be doing my THIRD and hopefully FINAL procedure next month. I will be writing up a blog about that too.
My Lipedema Journey 