I Hope You Came Here For Glamour

It may be an aspect of my physical ailments, but if I'm on a plane for longer than, say, 90 minutes, my ankles start to swell in a major way. Once I flew to Europe and when I got there my ankles were positively gargantuan. I'm surprised people didn't stop me in the airport and insist I go to the hospital. Honestly. So when I realized that my completely ludicrously scheduled flight to the East Coast was going to be a 12 hour journey, I knew I was going to have to take action. I was going to have to make yet another Old Lady Purchase. This time? Compression Socks. 

I learned a surprising amount about compression socks during my 10 minutes of Amazon.com research. I always thought of them as something you wear when you travel, are elderly, or are traveling while elderly. But they are commonly worn on the daily by nurses, waitstaff, and other professionals who are on their feet for long hours. Because of this I had tons of reviews to read and plenty of researching to do. But I was on a time crunch, and I didn't really care, so I bought the highest rated, most reviewed socks Amazon sold and considered it a fair deal.

The socks were a bit difficult to get on the first time, because I wasn't used to putting on such a snug garment. They come with directions, but I found that trying to follow the directions to the letter was making things more stressful, so I sort of split the difference between what the directions said and what I wanted to do, and it worked out fine. Basically it seemed to me that if your heel was in the right place, and the socks weren't pulled up too high (something I initially did, thereby decreasing their compression power) you were just fine, and it didn't really matter how you got them on in the first place. I expected my legs to feel, you know, compressed, but I didn't feel like my legs were in sausage casings from the knee down. My legs actually felt perfectly comfortable the entire time I was traveling. The big difference became noticeable when I got to North Carolina and took the socks off.

My ankles were just as they were when I left California. That's right. Not a bit of swelling. My legs and ankles were, for once, actually comfortable after a long haul flight. It was, essentially, a miracle.