I want to say, a few months ago, but I’m pretty sure this goes back several years (after looking at my list of unpublished articles). I called my wrist doc to set up an appointment for some pain I was having in my thumb. Now, in the past I’ve had 2 surgeries on my thumb – one to repair a torn ligament and dislocated bone where they put in 4 pins and then one to have the pins removed. It was awful and traumatic (if you want more detail on this injury to get what I’m talking about, here is another article I wrote about that) and hurt a LOT. I was afraid of what the doc would tell me. You have to have another surgery on your thumb, the last one needs repaired. You have reinjured the thumb and need pins. The scar tissue is building up in there and you need to have it removed. So many negative possibilities. So I cancelled the appointment.

I did this with appointments over and over every couple of months until just recently. I was making coffee and I reached up to grab the sugar from a shelf and almost dropped it in the sink. When I gripped it, pain shot up my arm and my first instinct was to… well… not do what I had just done – which was grip the less-than-1lb-canister of sugar. I knew then that I had better go in before I couldn’t grip anything at all. When I was grabbing anything, a weight at the gym, my water jug, my car handle, the door handle to my house, all of these things caused pain to shoot through my thumb, up through my wrist and up to my forearm on the top near my elbow.

Yesterday I finally went to my appointment. Talk about anxiety. Good thing they got me in to the appointment right away just to stick me in an exam room to wait for 40 minutes. I think some of that time he was using to examine my history, talk to the nurse and read through what I put on the short survey because when he came in he seemed to know exactly what was up. He ask me what I was having issues with – I’m sure just to make sure it’s the same as what I put on my paperwork. I told him and he showed me his closed fist with his thumb tucked in, thumb up. He told me to do the same with my hand and then [slowly] tilt my wrist down towards my pinky. He reiterated “slowly” because he knew it was going to hurt. As soon as I tilted my wrist down there were fireworks just SHOOTING up my forearm. Like a gun shot but with sparklers. Yay #sarcasm. I only did it for, MAYBE a half second.

He said I have “Mommy’s Thumb“. (The info in the linked article is better than I could ever explain it.) Now, that’s a surprise being that I have no children and not even a pet right now. I guess it’s an overuse injury that is common in new mothers who regularly pick up their baby and put it back down. This puts stress on the thumb and the ligaments that run through 2 tunnels in your wrist get inflamed and swell. Well, it could be one tunnel or two tunnels, one ligament or two ligaments, but likely one of the above has swelled and won’t allow the tunnel to be lubricated making it painful for a person to grip, hold or lift anything. Usually with new moms, they don’t go get it checked out and leaving it unchecked it will escalate until you can’t really use it any longer. For me, my fear of what it could be meant that the injury went unchecked and overtime I allowed the ligaments or tunnels to swell until I could barely use that hand any longer.

After Doc saw my reaction from the thumb test, he told me my diagnosis and then said I have 2 options. The first option is to have an injection into the tunnel… before he could even tell me the 2nd option, I said THIS. Do this. Because I knew what the 2nd option was. Surgery. I never even let him tell me what the surgery consisted of. He barely was even able to tell me that the shot was painful and not full-proof. He said the first shot had about a 60% success rate – meaning full-recovery. If that didn’t work, a 2nd shot had about a 30% success rate. Then the success rate drops exponentially to 5% (so pretty much not even worth trying). Lastly would be surgery.

It’s only at this point I wish I would have let him explain what the surgery entails. I truly do not want a 7th wrist surgery. I will say though, this would most likely be more like a carpal tunnel surgery (in my mind) and much less invasive. There won’t be a 3-9 month recovery period I don’t think. I say that, but I don’t really know. I truly hope I don’t need to find out.

When the nurse came in and set up the shot, I noticed he had set down 2 needles and more stuff there than normal. I decided I better go to the bathroom right then because I’m not sure I could handle the embarrassment of not being able to hold my bowels through the pain and having to walk out of the lobby in pee-pants. Because I was gone for a couple of mins, doc moved on to his next patient and I sat there and looked at this shot “stuff” for 15 minutes. I had less than 20% charge on my phone and I was texting my friend to tell her what was going on which did help my anxiety some!

So 15 minutes later he comes in and scoots over to me with the shot paraphernalia and tells me what’s going to happen. As soon as the shots are near me though, I just tell him I can’t watch and he tells all of this to the side of my head because my eyes are now staring at my purse. He used a cold spray that numbs the site, then inserted the first needle that had a numbing agent in it that gets inserted directly into the tunnel. He ask me if it hurt and I said no, it just felt like pressure going up my arm slowly. He let that sit for a few seconds and then put in the cortisone. He ask me if THAT hurt and I’ll be completely honest, I didn’t feel the needle go in. I didn’t even realize it was in there until I felt that uncomfortable feeling when the fluid goes in and everything gets tight. He said he had to move it around a bit and then he would be done.

Doc said that we will know if this shot actually worked at the 5-6 week point. He told me that it would likely be numb for 3 hours or so. I went home and my thumb got numb, like, actually numb. Around time for me to go to sleep the numbing agent wore off and the feeling of the shots, the fluid in my wrist, the pain, it all came back. I normally fall asleep around 10 but last night I finally fell asleep around midnight and woke up around 6am. It’s not PAIN this morning per say. It’s uncomfortableness. Basically everything he told me so far has come true so now we just wait.

Here’s to hoping it’s a one-n-done! I’ve never had that experience with my wrist before so I’m due!