I have bad kidneys, and in both my pregnancies, I had fluid retention and kindney infections, etc. After delivery, my legs were swollen, and I asked nurses to please massage my legs..yeah, they would come back...and never did! So my mum brought massage oil and came up daily and massaged my legs, after she massaged them, I would do a big wee and fluid finally started to move, and my kidneys kicked in!! If not for family caring, you die in hospitals!!! I was a nurse for 35yrs, always went the extra mile for my patients, and never got it reciprocated, but always stick up for my family members.
I never had kidney problems, got bad compartment syndrome and a fasciotomy, almost lost my leg. The swellin was disgusting. 55lbs all below the waist. My kidneys bounced back from 1% to almost 80% within a month. Makes me think theres someone up there it wasnt supposed to happen. Wasnt supposed to keep my leg either or be doing as well as I am today. Wouldnt take it back every day I feel grateful and I never really felt that before
Not everyone who sees this short will be medical and will know or understand that not all swelling is due to fluid. Please be careful and get medical information about what is causing the swelling BEFORE massaging. You could cause BIG problems
Lymphatic drainage massage therapist here!!!! Massage is great yes but to access the lymphatic vessels you need extremely light touch pulling the skin slowly towards the heart. Because its superficial not deep.
It’s a technique to make it look like you’re making a difference. That fluid is gonna move right back in a few minutes. It doesn’t just disappear. The only way for that to do something is to massage that way through the whole body and then apply compression garments and in an about 4-6hrs you should start to pee some out. Depending on why it’s there, it’ll STILL be back with new fluid if the other fluid even left at all. I live this.
Only do this when swelling is not because of injury but because of like organ failure, swelling with an injury is there to protect the structures in the area so you dont damage them more!
7 weeks ago i had foot and ankle surgery. My doctor had to cut my calf muscle away from the fascia because it was too tight, he had to shave the bone on the inside of my ankle, he removed a growth similar to a bunion and shaved more bone and put in screws. He went into the toe joint and scraped and cleaned it out. He cut across the top of my foot and had to do a bone graft. He cut along the outside of my foot and under the outside ankle bone and put in more bone grafts and a rod.. I get so swollen and my foot turns purple if its down very long. I understand the swelling and the misery. 8 more weeks befofe I can have the rod removed then months of physical therapy to learn to walk on it again. Yep, I understand the misery and swelling. I wish i could get it massaged but everything is cut up and bone grafts everywhere.
I've had leg and foot edema since i was 17 and I'll be 39 next month. One thing I've learned is that attempting to do what she just did is torture, just pure agonizing pain.
During high school, I went on a trip to Disney World to perform with my school band. We were staying for 5 days, performing on the first day. The bus ride there took almost 23 hours due to an emergency on the bus. 23 hours of doing nothing but sitting down, save for the occasional bathroom stop. During our 5 day stay at Disney World, most of the trip was waking up early, heading to each if the parks at the time of opening, and spending the entire day at each of the parks, nothing but walking and standing in lines for hours. Now, I was not the most active person and took very poor care of my physical health when it came to exercise, and this trip destroyed my leg muscles lmao. It got so painful to walk that it felt like I was walking on broken feet, and I spent the last day in a wheelchair. When I got back home, I had informed my mom (who was a nurse at the time) about the pain in my legs. When she looked at them, my legs were swollen from my toes up to my knees. You couldn’t even tell where my leg ended and my foot began. I was bed ridden for three days because of the amount of swelling caused by the pitting edema. No wonder my legs were so sore that whole week.
We had renal patients that sometimes their lower hands will swell up like a boxing gloves. When we needed an extra IV we would do the same thing to the hand to expose their veins to start the IV. It worked like a charm. And old RN taught that to me in the 1970’s. And I use to teach all my new nurses on the floor that trick
