wibblequikit

[wibblequikit]

I first noticed lipomas on my inner thighs in my mid twenties.I'm on mhy 47th trip around the Sun at the time of this post in May of 2014. They appeared rather quickly and have remained about 20-25 mm and they're noticable. I thought I was dead meat at first, but an Optometrist, of all people, knew exactly what they were and that was the first time I heard the word lipoma. Since then, over the following two decades, I have accumulated over 60 of the lumps on my forearms, abdomen and upper legs mainly. The larges is about 30mm on upper left thigh.
I'm white, 6'1" about 175lbs stable, blond/blue, near sighted (myopia around -5 diopters with a touch of with the rule astygmatism), active but not an avid exerciser unless you consider skiing foolishly fast exercise, typical diet for an omnivore but I avoid fast food like the plague that it is. I drink the alcohol on many occasions and have had several hundred cigarettes but I don't smoke for months at a time before I try to burn one down. Oh and that too but sparingly. I hope these pastimes are not exaserbating my condition because I don't think I'd give up Whiskey any time soon- too much fun and I think it prolongs Life, for me anyways. Moving on...
Medical history:
joints are for shit- several knee surgeries and osteoarthritis is gonna get the best of me before all is said and done I'm fairly certain. I've had a major heart attack (shocker- no for real, they shocked me like four times to establish a sinus rhythm- that was a close call) from a clot that popped into my left descending coronary artery at age 39. the cardiologist that fished it out through one of my femoral arteries showed the damn thing to me before the wheels came off and fluid backed up into my lungs and... I lived. It looked like a goldfish and bigger than I thought- like an inch long. No I don't have it a jar somewhere. Congestive heart failure also runs in the family but I'm not so sure it's not related to familial lipomatosis (my brothers both live with the lumps too:)
Dr Herbst's description of Dercum's disease and the way blood vessels leak into surrounding tissue causing an inflammatory response to leave behind fatty clumps of waste is eerily similar to what almost put me in the ground before the ripe old age of 40!
I'm aware that Dercum's is not the same thing as familial lipomatosis but they're in the same general area of disease for sure.
The only treatment I've attempted is a concentrated form of lipo-laser a year or so ago. I had atleast 8 half hour sessions with an infrared laser that had an approximate aperature focus of just under 1cm if held about 3-4 inches above the skin and slowly moved (by me) about the lesion. I forget the power in Joules but I increased it as we went. We took pics and measurements before but there was no need to follow up with anymore as the lipomas I focused on, 5 or so on my forearms, did not respond in the least. Believe me when I say I made them uncomfortably warm with the laser, so it wasn't a lack of effort on my part. I doubt this therapy will work for anyone with your garden variety lipoma like mine but go ahead if you must. Cool thing is the guy that owned the laser clinic stood by his word and didn't charge me a dime, as agreed at the outset, if it had no effect- which the infrared laser did not.
This disease is likely genetic for the most part- not to be Captain Obvious but science is slow like Madisonian Democracy for good reason. Ya gotta prove them theories or they're just pure conjecture, which can and has done more harm than good. That said, I'm curious as to what role living at altitude, say 1000 meters or more above sea level, has on one that's prone to this malady.
Diet probably is a factor but not as much as some think or we'd have eaten our way out of lump land long ago.
That's my story as I recall and it's sticking to me.