When she went to a pool, she was greeted by stares. Her varicose veins bulged like balloons. She had spider veins all over.
“Strangers would come up to me and ask what terrible thing happened to my legs,“ said Sokol, 33, of Pembroke Pines. “I couldn`t handle it anymore.“
Worse still was the pain. Unable to stay on her feet for more than a few minutes on a good day, she quit her job taking care of people`s plants.
She went on public assistance to help her raise her two children, Bernard, 10, and Melissa, 4. She could hardly play with them or take them out; the pulsating pain in her legs was too great.
Sokol had almost lost hope.
“I went to doctor after doctor, and they kept telling me there was nothing they could do,“ Sokol said.
They told her to keep her legs elevated and prescribed support stockings, she said.
“I became so upset and frustrated that I left one doctor`s office crying. I screamed out, `Tell me why my veins are doing this!“`
Feeling she had nowhere left to turn, Sokol wrote to Dr. Robert M. Biegeleisen Knight, the medical director of VeinCare of Florida, at the firm`s corporate headquarters west of Boca Raton.
Sokol told him she had read about his technique of treating varicose veins, called echosclerotherapy, and appealed for help.
“I had a vein stripped in my right leg when I was 24 years old, and I have had nothing but trouble with it ever since,“ Sokol wrote in late February.
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