The following post is personal, very personal. Not only am I sharing what it is like to go through tumescent liposuction for lipedema, but I’m sharing the pain, my body, and my experience as there is very little current experiences from women going through this out on the internet. I think it’s very important that if you’re considering surgery, you know what you’re in for.
Please feel free to share the link to my post, the only thing I ask is my blog to be given credit. Thank you, Petra.
Wednesday, February 10th in Rotterdam
On Wednesday, February 10th I went to Rotterdam for the 1st of 6 tumescent liposuction for lipedema treatments. This first surgery would be for both calves, ankle to knee.
Since this is the 2nd attempt (here’s the post about the January surgery being cancelled) I refused to allow myself to get excited. I still had my cough, since I really hadn’t been kidding about it sticking around till spring. However, not only had I been to my GP to get the cough cleared as a weird medical anomaly, the surgeon said as long as there was no fever I was fine.
I don’t know if it was luckily or not, but there was a major emergency at work so as the person in charge, that’s what I was dealing with on the drive over and the extra 60 minutes I had to wait to go get dressed since they were running late. I didn’t have time to get nervous!
Hurrying up and waiting is part of the tumescent liposuction for lipedema game
So there are about 4 parts to the whole procedure at the clinic I went to. The first part is the hurry up and wait game. Well, ok, the get dressed, shove a suppository up your bum, answer questions, get measured and drawn on then wait game.
I was given a hospital gown, little booties for my feet, a hair net, a thong that didn’t leave much to the imagination, rubber gloves, and a suppository and told to go get ready. To this day I still don’t know if I put the thong on right, or if I ever will since I wear granny panties…maybe I should ask next surgery for the giggles.
Oh, and the suppository is a pain killer.
After I was dressed and my items locked up (I couldn’t take my mobile or tablet in with me, I was sad), I went and got my calves and thighs measured yet again to make sure nothing changed for my stockings. I did slightly lose size since my initial appointment in October, so that was exciting. Yay MLD!
Then the doctor came in to draw on my legs in order to prepare for the tumescent liposuction for lipedema procedure. Now, if you watch the videos on Youtube for tumescent liposuction for lipedema, you see the doctor do all this drawing on the leg. My doctor drew lines in the front of both knees, muttered something under his breath and said that’s it. Apparently my calves were so fat that he didn’t even need to bother drawing his little map on them.
Since I didn’t think about it, I didn’t take a ‘before’ picture of my legs. Sorry, should have! But, this gives you an idea of what they looked like.
Then the surgeon had me remove my gown completely, leaving me in the thong that left nothing to anyone’s imagination, and he took pictures of my calves front, both sides, and back.
After that, I got my gown back on, climbed into bed and was given the second half of my pills. This basically knocked me out for about an hour since apparently they like taking you into the operating room groggy so you really don’t have time to get nervous. Good strategy.
It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s tumescent liposuction for lipedema surgery prep!
Well, that worked out well, didn’t it? Ok, ok, I’ll stop now and continue on with the story. So they woke me up from my nap, had me use the bathroom again (making it a point to not lock the door, apparently people fall back asleep on the toilet or fall) and then led me into the operating room.
The OR was pretty small and consisted of a counter with cupboards, some machines you see in the youtube videos, and a table with little areas on either side sticking out in cross fashion for your arms. I found myself thinking WTF, are they crucifying me here or sucking the fat out of my legs. Fortunately, I only thought it and forgot to say it (drugs can be good, m’kay?).
The nurses had me stand on a step stool, they basically took my gown and made a shirt of it, and then took the thong that hid nothing off of me so I was butt ass naked from the waist down. Now, I regularly go to dutch saunas that are nude only so I’m not the most modest person in the world (plus I work in the porn industry where nude is the new black) but I then found myself trying to process what the point of that thong was. Don’t ask me how I remember these thoughts…
At this point I had to cross my arms over my chest and the nurses proceeded to baptise my lower body in a cold, wet, and very red solution of iodine and other sanitizing stuff. In my drug addled head, it felt like it was going on FOREVER, especially since I was huddled in what was left of my hospital gown shivering for warmth. In reality it was probably less than 5 minutes.
After this, I had to get myself positioned on a rather tiny table in 1 go. This was like asking a beluga whale to please beach itself in a perfectly rectangular box on the beach. Somehow, I managed and one of the nurses proceeded to dowse my feet (I’m sure it was like wack a mole for her since it tickled the bottom of my feet) while the other hooked me up to heart rate monitors and put a privacy sheet so I couldn’t see what was going on. That I was kind of bummed about and thought about asking if she could take it down so I could watch, but I fell asleep again.
Just as I was drifting off, the surgeon came in to start filling my legs up with the tumescent liposuction solution. To be honest, I dozed through a good majority of it, which seemed to amuse everyone. But, there were a few parts that were painful.
I’ve heard some people say the first puncture made to insert the wand thingy that blows you up like a water balloon is what hurts. I hardly felt that part. The initial sticking of the wand in that burned like a SOB and then the thing vibrating, on what felt directly on my calf muscles or directly on my shin, that hurt the most. Whenever he went to a new place and started putting in fluid, it burned but after seconds the local anesthesia took over and it numbed.
After he filled my legs up to capacity, the surgeon went off to get a cup of coffee (yes, he actually said that…the dutch are fanatical about their coffee breaks and I guess this isn’t any different). The main reason he didn’t start right away is because it does take around 40 minutes to an hour for the local anesthesia to take over completely and numb everything.
If you ask me what the absolute worst part of the whole entire calf procedure was, I’d say it was this very long 40-60 minutes. Due to the fat accumulation on my butt, there’s a sway in my back so when I lay directly on my back, that sway in my lower back doesn’t touch whatever I’m laying on (mattress, massage table, etc) and it starts ACHING. So by this time I was in agony. Luckily, they allowed me to pull my legs up so I could put my heels by my butt and do hip thrusts, which kind of helped relieve the tension, and then they let me rotate my legs from side to side to help stretch. I just kept that up with my incredibly heavy, swollen legs.
Time to suck out the nasty lipedema fat!
After what seemed like hours, due to the nice sleepy time drugs wearing off and my lower back keeping me in agony, the surgeon came back and it was finally time to get rid of the fat in my calves! The time for my tumescent liposuction for lipedema to start was really happening!
I’d say for about 70% of the operation I didn’t feel much more than the pressure of the surgeon’s hand pressing down on the cannula. The other 30% was probably around an 8 on a 1-10 pain scale. The most painful part was where he was sucking the fat around my ankle. That was an outright 8. Since at this point I was flipped over on my stomach, I had a death grip on the pillow I had been laying on and was spewing obscenities at the surgeon while the heart rate monitor was beeping madly.
Luckily, the pain faded pretty quickly as soon as he stopped probing with the cannula. There were a few other places that stung, probably around a 5 or 6 but it wasn’t too bad. The ankles were by far the worse.
Cleaning Up and Getting Ready to Be Sent Home from Tumescent Liposuction for Lipedema Surgery
3.5 liters of fat later, I was done and ready to be prepped for going home. The nurses put plasters on the puncture wounds and then 3 nurses and myself worked to get thigh high compression stockings on my poor swollen calves and fat thighs.
After this, they made me into a bag lady. No, I’m not kidding, they put 2 medical grade garbage bags over my stockings and taped me in with medical tape (on my bare skin, no less. Ouch!!). They kept reminding me over and over that this was ONLY for the trip home so that the car was protected.
Once they got me all fixed up, they put me back into bed where they originally had done all the paperwork and had me rest after they gave me the sleeping meds, and fed me a light snack to help recover a bit. I got some beef broth and some typical dutch snacks.
After about 30-40 minutes they had my husband go get the car from the parking garage and pull it up to the clinic (this is Rotterdam, there’s no on street parking without permits). They then helped me get dressed in my sweat pants, sweat shirt and had me hobble outside carefully. This part is a tad dangerous because there was no way I was getting shoes or slippers on my feet so I had to go out shoeless. Luckily there was no glass or anything on the sidewalk.
The ride home was pretty long, about 2 hours since we got stuck in rush hour traffic. But it wasn’t totally painful since the local in my legs was still keeping things numb. I think we got home around 20:30 (that’s around 8:30pm) and I got out of the car and literally sloshed in the house. Since the wounds were only covered and not closed up, they were leaking fluid the whole trip home. Hence the reason for the garbage bags.
I was probably standing in a good half inch of fluid in that picture and my feet were all shriveled up from sitting in fluid that long. My legs in the stockings were very wet and the clinic had given my husband a medical grade tarp for the trip home. He put that on our brand new couch, that we literally had delivered a few days before, along with 2 beach towels.
In the course of an hour, I soaked through both beach towels and by 22:00 (10pm) when I decided to go up to bed, I had been through 2 changes of beach towels.
Final thoughts about tumescent liposuction for lipedema
After going through the tumescent liposuction for lipedema on my calves, I can say that there is pain involved and it’s messy. I’ll write another post with a check list in order to best protect your clothes, car, and furniture. However, overall, it’s doable and completely worth it to get the painful lipedema fat off your body.
Just don’t think that you’re going to have liposuction and the next day be doing some hardcore activity, it’s still surgery and if you’re in stage 2, 3 or beyond of lipedema, there’s going to be quite a bit of fat taken out. They took out 3.5 liters of fat from my calves alone. That’s quite a bit and it leaves a lot of space that needs to heal.
Next: Day 1 Post Calf Liposuction
PetraAnn
Latest posts by PetraAnn (see all)
- ABDOMINOPLASTY WEEK 6 POST-OP - January 29, 2020
- ABDOMINOPLASTY DAY 20 POST-OP - January 7, 2020
- ABDOMINOPLASTY DAY 18 POST-OP - January 6, 2020
OMGosh…..sounds tough….but you were a trooper! Congrats on the brave woman that you are…..