Meet Veronika, a 39-year-old Lipoedema patient hailing from the Czech Republic, whose journey started in her hometown of Prague and took her all the way to Gold Coast, Australia.
Ever since she was a child, Veronika had been tall, skinny, and athletic, but noticed her ankles were shaped a bit oddly compared to the rest of her legs. Once she had grown older and started working in retail, the symptoms in her legs presented far more clearly though.
She recalls, “I worked in retail and my legs would swell during the day. I wouldn’t fit in my boots after a shift. At the beginning the swelling and pain would ease over night. Progressively, it got so bad I had to stop working in retail as I was in pain 24/7. I would somehow get through my day at work but then I was a mess evenings and weekends.”
In 2011 she got an infection on her leg which progressively got worse and led to an assessment by her family dermatologist in Prague. At the appointment she had her infection treated just fine, but was also informed that it would never fully heal due to lymphoedema and Lipoedema, which her dermatologist also diagnosed her with.
Veronika now had an explanation for everything she had been living through, and had to focus on the task of treating it. Having moved to Australia, she didn’t know of any surgical options, and made a push for traditional conservative management techniques such as compression, MLD, and exercise.
In 2015 she flew back to Prague for 3 months to try and seek different conservative management treatment strategies, as well as listening to advice from American and UK social media channels. She trudged on to carry out her life normally, but just the next year in 2016 she suffered a physical and mental breakdown.
Veronika was forced to stop working and placed herself in the care of a psychologist, taking antidepressants and painkillers.
Luckily, she was able to steadily make a recovery and started to see hope after being introduced to a surgical option within Australia. She recalls, “I didn’t know there was a surgical solution for Lipoedema in Australia. My ex colleague saw the current affair segment and told me about it. The next day I phoned Dr Lekich’s office.”
Veronika was quickly placed on a renewed conservative management plan as a prelude to Lipoedema-Extraction Surgery. Utilising a protocol to manage underlying venous disease and a Lymph-Sparing technique, a total of 4.6L of diseased fat was removed from her lower legs in February 2023 by Dr Lekich.
Following a short period of rest she had a further 2.6L of Lipoedema fat removed from her anterior upper legs in April, followed by 4.3L in her posterior upper legs in June.
14 months after her third, and final, surgery, Veronika remarked, “I had my Australian friend visit me here in Prague at the beginning of this month. And she was like: “Wow, I’ve never seen your legs before. It looks so good!” She had only seen me pre surgery and always in compression of some sort.”