At the age of 15, Meagan Barnard developed lymphedema. She refused to discuss her feelings of abnormality, loneliness, and suicidality with her friends and family.
For more than ten years, she avoided wearing dresses or skirts and instead covered up her swelling leg with loose clothing.
Someone at her school even exclaimed, “I didn’t know that the Michelin Man went to school here,” in an attempt to make fun of her.
Meagan felt so horrible that she once wrote her father a suicide note because she didn’t believe she could take it any longer.
Meagan may store up to three liters of extra fluid in her left leg, which once swelled to more than twice the size of her right leg when she was 24 years old.
