Recently I’ve been having trouble with my left leg going to sleep and my ankle puffing up. The doctor looked at it and said, “Well first of all, get some exercise and lose about 100 pounds. But other than that, it’s probably an incompetent vein that’s not allowing blood to pump back up out of your leg.” He didn’t suggest much for it other than elevating it and not sitting for hours at a desk. He did say he was pretty sure it wasn’t a clot, particularly since it seemed to mitigate itself overnight and when I got up and moved around.
So I did some of my own research (“incompetent vein? WTF, over?”) and found the veins in the legs have backflow-preventer valves in them, and sometimes one or more of those valves go bad. Short of surgery or other invasive treatments, none of which have fabulous prognoses, the suggestions were normally to wear moderate compression socks to force circulation to happen. So I researched compression socks, and found some on Amazon. The ones I tried had the best ratings, so I bought a few pair, and damme if they don’t solve the problem…
I just got done walking 15 minutes on the treadmill and it was a stinkin’ breeze. A week ago I’d have been lucky to do five minutes before everything started to ache. Now it’s just my sacroiliac giving me fits, and that’s because I hang over too much in the front.