Tammy Wallace

By last July the vein behind my left knee had risen up like a blue cord under the skin. And the compression socks I had worn every single day for three summers were quietly making it worse. I did not learn that from a doctor. I learned it the week I finally took them off. My name is Carol. I am sixty-three. I live just outside Marquette, up in Michigan, where the summer is short and you wait the whole year for it. I was a nurse for thirty-one years, most of them on my feet, walking the same long hallway on the same floor of the same hospital until my knees knew it in the dark. I have been married to Ron for thirty-nine years. We have one daughter, and a granddaughter named Posey who is six and asks me a great many questions. I tell you all of that so you know what kind of woman is writing this. I am not a salesperson. I spent my whole career being the one who read the label before anyone took anything. For most of my life my legs were just my legs. I wore sundresses and I wore shorts and I did not think about it once. Then somewhere around the year everything else started changing, the veins showed up. First a little blue web behind the knees. Then one rope of a vein that you could see from across the room. I told myself it was just age. I told myself every woman's legs change and mine were no different. I told myself it was not that bad, and that nobody was looking anyway. But I knew the difference between fine and not fine, because I had spent thirty-one years looking at legs that were not fine. There is a pale yellow sundress I bought on a trip to Door County the summer Posey was born. I stopped wearing it. Not all at once. I just reached past it every morning and took down the long skirt instead. By the third summer I was wearing jeans to the lake, in July, in Michigan, sweating, so that no one would see the back of my knee. The day I could not get around it was my son-in-law's birthday. We were out in the yard, it was about ninety degrees, and I was the only grown woman there in long pants. Posey climbed up next to me and asked why Grandma wears winter clothes when it is summer. She was not being unkind. She was six, and she was right. I had a feeling in my chest I did not have a name for, so I made everyone a plate and I did not say anything. I had already tried the things you try. The compression socks that cost thirty dollars a pair, that itched, that left my feet smelling like something had died in them, that I peeled off at the end of a shift with my legs throbbing worse than before I put them on. The injections, the ones they call sclerotherapy, that I paid for twice and that felt like a row of bee stings, and that brought the veins right back inside of a year. I had read enough, by then, to know where untreated legs like mine can go over time, and as a nurse that was the part that actually scared me. So I was not looking for a miracle. I was looking for one thing that was not a band-aid, and was not a needle, and did not cost me my whole summer. I found it the way you find most real things. From another woman who was not trying to sell me anything. In the spring there was a little retirement lunch for one of the nurses I had worked beside for years. Her name is Marlene. She came in wearing a dress, and her legs looked the way legs look when a person has stopped thinking about them. I am ashamed to say I stared. I finally asked her, quietly, the way you ask another woman a thing like that. She got a little embarrassed. She said she had been using something for about a year and had not really told anybody, because it felt like a small private thing. She said it was a serum in a pen with a little brush on the end, and that you run the bristles up the leg, from the ankle toward the knee, in the morning. She wrote the name on the back of her parking receipt and slid it across the table. VenaLift Pen. She told me to read what was in it first, the way I would tell anyone. And she said the thing I keep coming back to. She said, half the women on our old floor are doing this and none of us mentioned it to each other for years. I am a hard person to sell. So I went home and I did what a nurse does, which is read. There are two things in it. Horse Chestnut, which helps the small muscle around the vein tighten up and move the pooled blood along instead of letting it sit. And Calendula, which goes to work on the vein walls and the little valves inside them, the ones that are supposed to keep blood moving up and stop sagging open. That is the whole reason my legs were the way they were. The valves were tired and the blood was pooling and the wall was stretching. And what struck me was the shape of it. The socks squeeze the leg from the outside. The needles close a vein off. This was the only thing I had come across that worked along the inside of the wall, where the actual trouble was, instead of fighting it from the outside. It is not a needle. It is not a procedure. You twist the bottom, the serum comes up onto the brush, and you run it up your leg. So I ordered one. The first two weeks I did not notice anything in particular. I want to be honest about that, because I had read enough not to make a thing of the first few days. Then, sometime around week four, I put the yellow sundress on in the kitchen one morning. Not to go anywhere. Just to see. I made a quiet note and I left it at that. A few weeks after that I caught myself sitting out on the porch in the evening with my legs straight out in front of me. I had not pulled a throw over them. I did not even notice I was not hiding until I was already not doing it. And then in the middle of July my niece got married, outside, on a hot bright afternoon. I wore a dress. Bare legs. And the thing I want you to understand is what did not happen. Nobody looked. Including me. I did not spend that wedding thinking about my calves. I spent it at the wedding. When I went in for my regular check-up I mentioned I had been using it, the way I mention everything, and my doctor had no concerns about me carrying on with it. She told me to keep doing whatever I had been doing. I want to be careful with what I am telling you. I also started walking more this year, and putting my legs up on the wall at night the way I used to tell my own patients to. So I cannot stand here and tell you one little pen did the whole thing on its own. What I can tell you is that I added one small thing to the list of things I was already doing. I kept everything else the same. And I got a summer back that I had quietly written off. That is the honest version, and I would not give you a cleaner one. Anyone who hands you a cleaner one is selling you harder than I am. Legs are different, the same way bodies are different. Some women notice the look of it changing inside a few weeks, some take a good while longer, and I am sure some do not notice much at all. I happened to be one of the ones it worked for. I am a sixty-three-year-old retired nurse in Michigan. I am not the person to tell you what your legs will do. But I spent three summers in long pants, and I am not doing that again, and I thought you should at least know the thing exists. That is the whole reason I wrote this. P.S. The part I respect is the brush. They could have made it a cream you smear on with your hand and never reaches anything. They put a little bristle applicator on it so it actually works the serum into the skin along the line of the vein, ankle to knee, the direction the blood is supposed to move. The small decisions a company makes when nobody is watching tell you most of what you need to know about them. P.P.S. The whole routine is about thirty seconds. You twist the bottom, you run the brush up your leg in the morning, and you get on with your day. I do mine standing at the bathroom sink before my coffee. That is the entire thing. P.P.P.S. Please talk to your own doctor, especially if you have ever had a clot or anything going on in the deeper veins. Your doctor has your whole picture in front of her. I have written you a letter. There is a difference, and the difference matters. P.P.P.P.S. Order it from the company's own site so you get the real one and not some refill bottle off a marketplace. That is the only place I would trust it from. P.P.P.P.P.S. If you are reading this in long pants in July, the way I was, I hope you get your summer back too. Mine is sitting in the closet right now in the shape of a pale yellow sundress, and I plan on wearing it out. https://try.getjustjenny.com/adv/health-veins