Ow, but yay
“So she told me to wear a band underneath the elbow.”
The physical therapist shook her head. “Bet that didn’t help. Probably made things worse.”
“Yep.”
“Figured. This has got ‘ulnar nerve’ written all over it.”
Well, woo-hoo, that’s only what I’ve thought all along. All injury aside, it’s a considerable relief to feel correctly diagnosed!
The diagnostic process involved all kinds of bendy-twisty “tell me when it hurts” “OW!” tricks, as well as measurements of how much joint movement I have (not as much as I should in several places) and how much strength I have in my hand and fingers (ditto; the last two fingers of my left hand are pretty impressively useless).
She loved my ganglion cyst (it is a beaut) , and enjoyed telling me that I’m the first person she’s met in seventeen years of practice with substantially greater grip strength in the non-dominant injured hand. (Yeah. Go figure. I wasn’t expecting that either.)
What it works out to is that the anatomy of my arm around the ulnar nerve is a hellacious mess in several places. (Forget double-crush. We’re talking quadruple or worse.) The radial and median nerves, while not super-hurt the way the ulnar nerve is, aren’t entirely happy either. Moreover, I’ve got some over-tight musculature in the neck and shoulders that isn’t helping.
So she did some more bendy-twisty things to my neck, and some pokey-proddy-rubby things to my arm that hurt like dammit; I found myself involuntarily protesting what she did to the outer edge of my forearm beneath the elbow. She did, however, restore some range-of-motion and reduce some tenderness—I stretched my left arm straight without elbow pain for the first time in months.
She seemed a little disappointed at not getting better results. Me, I’m absolutely ecstatic at any results at all. Right now I’m rather sore (though I have to actually do bendy-twisty things to feel sore; at rest, my arm feels fine), but happier than I’ve been since I started this quest in April. For the first time, I feel like something can be done to fix what I’ve done to myself.
Back in this Friday, then again two Mondays after that. Life is good.