Life Changing Secrets and Leg ‘Magic’…or so They Claim

Do you wear compression stockings? If so you might have liked a class I went to this week called, Healthy Legs. The class description started out, “Maintaining a healthy active lifestyle starts with energizing your legs” and I didn’t bother to read the rest. Had I done so, I would have known it was put on by Juzo Compression Garments. I don’t wear compression stockings and after watching three 30ish, skinny model types pushing the idea that, “EVERYONE needs to wear these no matter your age” I did not join the cult. Although they did have styles for everyone---ankle, knee and thigh high, open toed for scandals and panty hose plus garments just for sleeping. Each of those came with compression rates from 15% to 50% and even though they come in some cool tie-dyed and jewel colors, none of those young women fooled me with their “Spanx for legs” jokes. They still looked medicinal.

And it wasn’t just the stockings. You’d need accessories just to get them on---special gloves, a ‘donner pad’ for the floor, donning lotion and a parachute-like device that helps you thread these stocking up your legs. It all made me feel very old for reasons that are probably related to why I resisted having a magnifying glass next to my chair in the living room for so long. Old people gear here and there and before long I might as call my house a nursing home.

Someone asked why the compression stocking she wore didn’t stay up and the answer was: there are two types of human legs---stove pipes and pie shaped and if you are in the wrong type and/or size garment they won’t work. You need measurements taken up and down and around your legs at several places to get the right compression in the right places. The garments has different compression ratings in different parts, the higher up your leg they go. So why compress your legs? Apparently it helps push the blood from your feet up to your heart where it gets oxygenated before the blood returns to your feet. I did not stick around to get a fitting. I will not be asking my doctor next month at my bi-annual appointment if I'd benefits from compression stockings like these ladies suggested. I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears and sing, "La, la, la, la, I can't hear you!"

Also this week I went to my book club where we had our best discussion ever. The book that inspired it was The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards. The blurb says this: “…the novel begins on a winter night in 1964 when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins…but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down’s syndrome.” In a split-second decision he asks his nurse to take the baby to an institution and tells his wife the girl was born died. Instead, the nurse left town, keeping the baby to raise as her own---two secrets that the wife and other twin didn’t find out about until after David died sixteen years later. 

Everyone in my book club had a story to tell about babies given up for adoption, most in secret that got revealed years later. One woman found out a week after her mother died that she had an older brother. It seemed her two aunts had kept the secret long enough and they gave her the contact information for the long-lost older brother. She said she felt like her whole life had been based on a lie because her mom had told her she was a virgin when she got married when, in fact, she’d had an affair with a married man. Her younger brother refused to believe it and didn’t want anything to do with meeting the half-brother. Fast forward ten years she hadn’t contact the older sibling, lost his contact information during a move and the aunts died. And she is left to wonder why her mother lied.

Another woman had recently found a message on her phone from a cousin who wanted to get together. “My mom told me a secret about your mother that is going to blow your mind.” She was afraid to call the cousin back. On one hand she wanted to know what it was but her older sister told her, “Trust me, you’ll wish you didn’t know.” The consensus in the book club was that a lot of secrets went to the grave with women in past generations. It was a different time for unmarried and pregnant young women and none of them could have ever imagined how easily their babies-out-of-wedlock secrets could get tracked down in our modern, internet savvy world. There are whole websites devoted to the effort. ©