As someone who ACTUALLY HAS chronic venous insufficiency, may I say [View all]

That I have something to expound:

I am a dentist who worked standing up my entire career of essentially 50 years including schooling. When I was about 45-50 I began developing thin varicosities near my ankle of my left foot, likely because I utilized my right foot to activate the pedal for the handpieces and thus leaned heavily to the left. Things were stable until I was 63 years of age and I received an insect bite on my left leg halfway down my shin. My leg acutely swelled up such that I took myself to the ER thinking it might well be a blood clot and the physicians felt the same way.

After multiple tests and sonograms they posited that the insect bite caused my lymphatics to open wide and because I had been, for want of a better word, abusing my leg, all the vessels of my limb were now likely permanently somewhat dilated. Sure enough, my left leg is slightly to somewhat swollen at the end of every day and it is nearly totally relieved in the morning when I awaken. I live with this and accept it: better than many of my comrades who suffer horrendous back pain from sitting and twisting/leaning for decades.

Other than my foot and lower aspect of my ankle, I show no signs of this condition. Now here’s the thing: to render this diagnosis definitively I had the following to rule out more serious illness: weekly leg sonograms for four weeks, treadmill stress test, PET scan stress test, sonogram of my heart, and three or four other tests including blood tests every 90 days. They distinctly informed me that since I had no other symptoms and the tests were essentially negative across the board, that this is LIKELY my diagnosis.

I don’t have ecchymosis of my hands, I don’t have swollen legs bilaterally, I do not have pallor, and I don’t exhibit many of the outward signs and symptoms which President Orangina does. But here’s the point: I eat relatively healthily, am active all day in terms of movement, I am not grossly overweight, I do not need for whatever reason to put makeup on my hands, and people tell me I look well for a male of my genetic background who’s over 70. And yet I have a condition which arguably is relatively minor as things go, but a condition of cardiovascular disease nonetheless.

I am of the absolute near-certain opinion that given the outward visualization of this guy, the docs and the handlers sat down and decided that the absolute most benign condition which could be diagnosed from his appearance alone was chronic venous insufficiency. My considered professional diagnosis after viewing over seventy thousand patients in my career is “No Fucking Way”.

As a coda, please allow me to say that if in fact this were true, then it woukd be the first time in which they told the truth about anything. The odds are low on that score in my estimation.