Carpal Tunnel and De Quervain’s Release Surgery

I’ve been meaning to write about my surgery experience for a minute but hand surgery kinda puts a cramp in your typing abilities (literally).

The History

Anyway. I’ve had wrist issues since my sophomore year of high school, first starting with tendonitis in my left wrist from overdoing it with violin when I was in pit orchestra, honors orchestra, and private lessons for violin and piano at the same time. Total nerd injury. Doc’s advice was rest, ice, brace, advil. But since you can’t really stop playing when two weeks out from opening night, I kept going, threw a wrist brace on, and attempted to slow down. I did try to sit out during orchestra class and rest for a bit, but my orchestra director was cuckoo at best and made my life miserable whenever I said that it was too bad to play that day.

The play ended, the director left (thank God) and I ended up leaving private lessons about a year later. My right wrist started acting up because either she felt left out of the extra attention or she was overworked from trying to pick up lefty’s slack. Junior and senior year it would come and go, especially for piano, but I had slowed down on the amount of violin that was going on and that seemed to help.

During college my right wrist would act up more, potentially all the note-taking? I did make a freakishly large crochet afghan my sophomore year so I think they both acted up at that point but otherwise it was more my neck and ongoing drama with plantar fasciitis. (My body is a hot mess who does what she wants.)

Then, my last semester, I had a fantastical idea of taking 1st Year Latin to try to help with my law career aspirations (while I took the class, law school went out the window). While the Latin has mostly left me, the adjunct professor was a spirited old lady that offered knitting lessons at a local coffee shop for extra credit. I already knew how to knit from my grandma, but I asked if she could teach me how to cable. She could, and she did during one of her office hours. I was hooked and was off to the races, starting an Etsy shop about 18 months later.

My wrist issues started up again with a vengeance, but at first it was fine to alternate time resting with knitting and bracing. During the fall and winter I dealt with pretty constant pain, but no one suggested getting steroid shots or seeing a specialist, mainly they threw braces and NSAIDs at me.

Then I had a baby. Carrying her around was a round-the-clock thing, and oddly it hurt my right wrist more. I went back to the doctor and got another brace and was told it was just a tendonitis flare up. At this point it had been 12 years of on and off again tendonitis, surely this wasn’t normal in a person this young?

I had another baby and decided to take my business in a new direction by adding crochet back into the mix. Nobody understandably buys many knits during the summer and plushies were so popular and I had just joined a market collective and was eager to make this idea work!

I made a lot of plushies, I sold a bunch of plushies…and my pain added a new body part: my thumb. A family friend in med school wondered if it was De Quervain’s after doing the classic test for it. A few weeks later, I felt a pop and so much pain and thought I had burst the ligament. I went to the ER, where they officially diagnosed me with de Quervain’s, x-rayed to make sure I didn’t actually burst anything, and gave a new brace and a bill for $3,000. Coolcoolcool.

At the follow-up appointment with my normal doc’s office, she put in a referral to a hand specialist in case I wanted to go see one. She also did some of the physical checks and it came back with carpal tunnel symptoms too. But I didn’t want to go the surgery route. That was nuclear, right?

Hand Specialist

Finally, in January, I jumped on ye old Youtube and looked up surgery. And I was flabbergasted when it was such a small incision. They cut the tendon and voila! I couldn’t believe that it seemed like such a minor surgery for something that had been bugging me for going on 17 years.

I called and made an appointment. Their first approach was to try the steroid shot, which I was skeptical would work, despite the assertion that it works for most people. Maybe those people are smarter and go in sooner? But, given that the last time I had drawn the big guns (ER instead of urgent care) it was an overreaction, I went that route instead of straight to surgery.

I went ahead and got the injection, and to be fair, it did last for a good two months. But then it wore off and the pain came back and felt worse, now I was used to not being in pain. I went back and got the shot a second (last, they only do it twice) time but talked to them about surgery this time. They said that they had to wait a month from when this shot was but then we could go ahead and schedule, so I did.

A Side Quest: Carpal Tunnel

After the follow up from the ER appointment last fall, I noticed that I was feeling more of the symptoms of carpal tunnel – more of a nerve twitch and my hands were starting to fall asleep more easily. When I went to my gym I would feel it more with certain movements.

Given my family history of my great-grandma and grandma having the surgery and my mom starting to think she needed it, I asked if it would be possible to just do both at the same time. The specialists had me go do a nerve test, which was a weird experience and ultimately came back negative because it wasn’t that bad yet. I felt stupid at that appointment, not because of the doctors per say, but that it was so weird to have such a long history of things and the nerves were performing fine.

When I went in for the pre-op check, the PA did the physical exam for both the de quervain’s and carpal tunnel, and both physical exams suggested that I did in fact have both, just that the carpal tunnel wasn’t as advanced yet. The PA reassured me that they had operated on people who had tested negatively on the nerve test but positive on the physical test, and said that since carpal tunnel is a degenerative disorder, she recommended doing it as a two-fer. We set a date. I felt so relieved.

Surgery

A few tips:

• If you’re female, they may make you take a pregnancy test prior to surgery. Staff told me it depends on the facility. But because I hadn’t had anything to drink since midnight and the front desk staff didn’t warn me of this, I peed in the lobby waiting room and couldn’t go again for the test. I signed a release instead since I knew I wasn’t pregnant.
• Your doctor may have you wear compression socks for a few days (recommended weeks?) after the surgery. I didn’t know that.
• You will be under anesthesia but you’ll be taking a nice, dreamless nap. I had been under the impression that I would be awake but loopy but it makes more sense to be asleep.

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  Carpal Tunnel and De Quervain’s Release Surgery