Presenting Miss Kathy Bates!

Thank you Kathy Bates!!!!   The lymphedema community has a celebrity spokesperson!  I know Ms. Bates stepped up a few months ago now, but it deserves to be applauded and discussed again and again.   As an essentially invisible community in the mainstream society, we desperately needed someone who could take the cause by storm and gain national (and international) attention.  Even though lymphedema and lymphatic disease affect up to 10 million people in the U.S., which is more than who suffer from ALS, AIDS, Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy, and multiple sclerosis COMBINED (Lymphatic Education and Research Network)...there is astonishingly little awareness both among the masses and the medical community.

Watch Kathy Bates on an episode of The Doctors here


This lack of general knowledge is excruciatingly frustrating, particularly when you go to a new doctor and have to explain the whole lymphatic system to him or her and why compression stockings from the drug store will not help the swelling. These exhausting and defeating incidents make it very difficult to keep our heads up and continue to make our voices heard.  I think the hardest part is having to expose ourselves, the parts of ourselves that are most vulnerable.  We have to take a deep breath,  remember the aspects of life that we are grateful for, and take another step forward.  We have to think about future patients with lymphedema and lymphatic disease and struggle for their health.

Kathy Bates is a hero.  She goes through the daily physical and emotional obstacles we all do. But because of the nature of her career, when she speaks out, she is not just speaking out to her family and friends.  She is exposing herself to the world.  She is making a sacrifice for all of us, and I want to help her.  In order to make change, we need to educate.  I believe that we need to find our courage and strength, and talk about our lymphedema to our families, friends, doctors, nurses, colleagues...anyone!  Maybe, we can even show them what it looks like.  We have lymphedema, and we deserve adequate medical care, insurance coverage, and acknowledgement.