Judith Divvens is no stranger to medical procedures. She started racking up surgeries like a ball player does stats starting in 2010. She’s had back vertebrae fused (twice), a rotator cuff repaired, tailbone opened up, and a knee replaced. When she and her husband, a retired military vet, moved to San Antonio from North Carolina in 2018, they embraced the warmer winters and great culture.
But then she started having really bad neck pains, followed by another surgery. During those medical procedures, Judith gained weight that was increasingly stubborn to lose. She sought the advice of a doctor who put her on water pills, but she kept retaining water she was unable to eliminate, and her legs and abdomen just kept swelling. After nearly six years of water pills, one day, she struggled to walk from her bedroom to the bathroom and collapsed on the floor. The paramedics who attended her that day said she was essentially dead. Her lips were blue, she wasn’t breathing, and had no pulse. The medical team defibrillated her heart and determined that all the excess fluids had pushed into her lungs, and she was basically drowning. After a four-day stay in the hospital under the care of a cardiologist, much of the water weight came off, only to return, with a vengeance. It was finally determined that it wasn’t water that was creating the swelling, but lymphatic fluid. Years of water pill therapy had impaired her kidneys and other organs, and Judith, at 5’10”, topped the scale at 260 pounds due to lymphedema. The lymphatic waste fluid in her body couldn’t be eliminated due to poor circulation. As a result, Judith was in stage one of congestive heart failure and third stage renal disease.
“We didn’t even have a life, we couldn’t do anything fun,” Judith reflected. “I could just get out of a bed and sit all day and go pee in a port-a-potty next to the chair, and I needed help doing that. My husband used to have to roll me over like a log to get me to move. A lot of times I was going to sleep and figuring out how to not wake up. I was going through depression. I couldn’t get on an airplane and see my family.”
One of the ladies in their senior living center told Judith and her husband about Medical Vein Clinic, and she made an appointment with one of our trained vein and lymphatic specialists. Before they could treat her veins, she needed to shed some of the fluids. Our team sent her to a trained massage therapist who taught her how to wrap her legs from her upper thighs to her toes to help push the fluid through the body. After she shed 20 pounds, an MVC doctor went to work on her legs using sophisticated ultrasound equipment to pinpoint the bad veins that needed to be treated. Judith had a total of four treatments over two months to close veins that weren’t working and reroute her circulation to good veins. MVC’s experts advised that it would be eight months to a year or so for the new veins to start working and eliminate the excess fluid.
“Lo and behold,” Judith shared, “one day I woke up about 1.5 years later and my body just really wanted to walk. I started doing active doing stuff, cruising, enjoying life. I went 260 pounds to 198 and from wearing 5X clothes to a size 18 today. My memory has come back, my circulation is now working and I can keep off the weight now! I have no more congestive heart failure. After my body system got a chance to release all the poisons in there, I now can go to the gym, swim, and walk.”
Judith believes all her surgeries caused the lymphedema. “Your body is going through a lot of stress. Anything that puts stress on your body is going to do that.” Now in her seventh decade, she is healed and paying it forward. She led a successful legislative initiative to get Medicare and TriCare to reimburse lymphedema patients for the medical supplies to wrap their legs, ensuring they don’t have a roadblock to receiving the care they desperately need. She now encourages others with lymphedema to go through the procedures and treatments. “It’s a process, but so worth it!”
