by coyote » Mon Aug 14, 2006 1:53 am
Joy,
The butt massage is a matter of putting your hands on you back or butt area and pulling them in around your waist toward your abdomen. Just keep scooping in toward your abdomen. My LE therapist taught me this technique.
You could also pull the fluid in toward your inguinals, I suppose, but the cisterna chyli (which is located in the deep lymphatics in your abdomen) is your main lymph "drain", so that is the best place to send it on back to the bloodstream and onwards toward the bladder. The abdomen is very important area to focus on clearing.
If you look at diagrams of the lymphatic system and look for the most concentrated areas of the lymphatics (the throat, armpits, abdomen, inguinals, inner thigh near the knee), you can see where you should direct the fluid to in any area of your body. For instance I have facial edema, I pull fluid to my ear lymph nodes from my eye areas and then down to my throat lymph nodes or directly down my face to the throat lymph nodes to clear my face.
If there is something that is blocking the pathway (scar tissue from a surgery, radiated areas), simply go around that area. There is no foolproof way. A lot of it is trial and error. For example, a woman at the LE support group I just went to had surgery and radiation on both sides of her lower face and throat areas. What she does to clear lymph fluid from her face is to pull it around the back of her head (instead of the front like I do) and down. Pay attention to your body and see if what you do makes an improvement or not. Just be sure not to direct fluid toward your genital or bladder areas, that just isn't very helpful to develop LE in those areas. You can massage fluid away from those areas, but never to them.
So, I massage my shoulders from my arms up toward my armpit and around the back of my shoulder toward my armpit or toward my throat. I clear my shoulder blades in front toward my throat.
First you want to clear the main lymph pathways (the throat, armpits, abdomen, inguinals, inner thigh near the knee), then massage your shoulder area and sometimes you need to go back and clear those lymph pathways again and again to get relief. Don't go too fast...and be patient. sometimes it takes doing it for awhile, like days, sometimes weeks, before you notice a difference, if you are very "full" of fluid. Got to clear out the logjam before the lymph can flow freely. Compression garments help to maintain the reduction of swelling that the MLD provides.
Hope this helps!