Modern Medicine

I am grateful for modern medicine.  Not that you would necessarily  remember, but with each of my pregnancies I have varicose veins that get increasingly worse each time.  A little fact that you may not know is that when you are pregnant your bodies' blood volume increases by 50% and when the extra blood in your body just sits there in your legs making them throb because the valves in the veins that are supposed to pump the blood back to the heart aren't working it becomes really uncomfortable. I compare it to when your leg falls asleep - like really bad and you start to get feeling back or like the throbbing you get when you put your entire leg in a bucket of ice water.  Try having that almost constantly unless I put my feet up, quite literally.  I wore compression hose for 2 pregnancies to help prevent it from worsening.  The reality is that they will still get worse because the crazy hormones of pregnancy also cause your blood vessels to dilate to accommodate the craziness that pregnancy causes to the body.  Don't get me wrong it is a miraculous and amazing process to grow a baby,  but the aftermath on a mommy's body is kinda crazy - at least for a while.    Honestly though, by the end of the last pregnancy, I would say the pain from the veins was far worse than the actual pain during delivery and it made it really difficult to do normal things like kneel to pray, bathe kids, and even stand (toward the very end).

Now - I am not announcing that we are trying to get pregnant or anything,  but yes we do want to have more children at some date in the future, so I talked with my doctor about what my options are for next time around.  He said yes, having another baby will make it worse whether I have the surgery or not - this I knew,  but our plan is this:  In hopes to eliminate the pain (for the most part)  they will do vein ablation on the main vein that is now 4+ times the size it should normally be.    By doing that they say it should stop the blood flow from there to all the little tributaries that branch from that main vein and hopefully alleviate the pain it causes.  Why am I sharing all this technical jargon with you?  They are doing the procedure this week,  and I'm just getting a little nervous about it, but I know it will be fine. I'm just grateful that there are such marvelous modern miracles.  So,  here is a couple of lovely before pictures and I'm hoping to say goodbye to the havoc the veins have caused.  Wish me luck.