I was recently in the hospital because sometimes you just shouldn’t use a sledgehammer at my age… I didn’t do anything serious but I did hurt the muscles in my chest which made me think I was having a heart attack. All that aside, while I was there I realized that the amount of gut-wrenching pain associated with getting my blood pressure taken could NOT be normal and I set out to see if anyone else was like me. What I found was Lipedema. A painful fat disorder that I have never heard of in all my life. Its been around since before I was born but no one told me about it and no one looked at me and said, “I think you have this!” After looking through the images on these pages about the disease, I thought, “That’s me!” The more I read and researched, the more I realized that this undiagnosed disease has run down through the women in my family for generations. I am determined to find out all I can and to enlighten others who may also be like me. Others are still thinking that their heavy painful arms are normal. These oversized arms that they have always had to deal with, that got worse after puberty and after pregnancy, and even after menopause are NOT normal. The heavy pebbly fat that you are carrying on your upper arms and legs is NOT normal. Actually, for the first time I found out Normal Fat is actually fluffy! It does not feel like a human bean bag or a bag of pearls and it is not cool to the touch like ours because normal fat doesn’t have water trapped inside the fat that forms tiny bead-like nodules that are painful when pressure is applied. It’s time to share the freedom of knowing the truth.