dequervain's
december 12, 2007
i know...you all thought i was going MIA again huh? :p no, i'm just slow at writing my entries cause it's such a damn busy time of year right now.
and because my hands are cold. they need to make UGG mittens. :p or do they have them already?
anyway, are you wincing at the photo above? one of the reasons i really didn't update was because i had a 2nd hand surgery this year. sometime in july i developed dequervain's' disease (i love wikipedia) in my left wrist/thumb. i tried medication, steroid injection (ugh), 24/7 splint and rest but nothing made it better. so finally on september 30th, i went in for a dequervain's release surgery.
how odd is it to have 2 different hand surgeries this year on either hands! back in march, you may recall i had a surgery on my right palm to do a trigger finger release. it took awhile to get it back to 100% normal use but july rolled around and this meanie came on.
ugh, i was so not happy and feel like i'm at constant battle with my body (which i'll get to in another entry). the only thing my orthopedic surgeon could chalk it up to is that i all these treatments i'm on to deal with my endometriosis and chocolate cysts screwed up my hormones and made me retain water and swell in all sorts of places. unfortunately for me it settled twice on my hands! somehow it inflammed certain tendons in my body and it was pretty unbearable especially when your quality of life was suffering due to this. it got to a point i couldn't wash dishes (hehe) or lift a plate or my purse etc. driving was a pain and forget about lifting ANY weights or doing any martial arts. :(
finally after nearly about 3 months of treatment, i had enough and decided to pursue the option of a surgery. when i went to see my orthopedic surgeon, i found out he was retiring that very friday. OMG wth was i gonna do? i really didn't want to see a new ortho and drag this on any longer. so i asked him really nicely if he would please fit me into his schedule that week and you know what? he put me in as his very very last surgery of his nearly 40 year career. i felt so honored.
of course going into surgery is not my happy thing but oh well. i went in and came out of it very well and i didn't have to do any physical therapy either. it was harder to heal this in the first couple of weeks and there was a lot of pain perhaps because of the location. i had an easier time healing my right palm. overall, it's been nearly 2.5 months since my surgery and i'm about 90% back to normal. i still can't lift really heavy things yet but at least the pain is gone. i do have an ugly scar on my left wrist along with scars from the "tension blisters" (see above pic) that developed during healing.
but at least i can finally do a lot of the things we usually take for granted....like scratching my back. :p
currently listening to: juan luis guerra, senales de humo
