Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Trigger Finger

I am now 2 for 2 with thumb injuries from my children.

You might recall that I suffered from "Mommy Thumb" after Iyla was born, ultimately having to have surgery on the inflamed tendon that was causing my ailment.

All was going great with my hand until 3 months ago when I had my first swim lesson with our Giant Baby Eloise. Something happened during that class that resulted in my thumb feeling severely sprained. It was very sore and painful to the point where I finally splintered it lest I bump it on ONE MORE THING and erupt in another slew of curse words. I quickly discovered that losing use of one's right thumb is extremely incapacitating.

Note that this new injury occurred at almost EXACTLY the same time postpartum as the Mommy Thumb showed up with Iyla, and on the SAME THUMB.

So fast forward 3 months later to today. I'd thought a sprain would have healed up by now, but my thumb is still being a jerk and no longer has the range of motion it once did. It has been locked in a semi bent position, is very sore at the base, and on the rare occasion where I can somewhat still bend it backwards, it will POP back and forth painfully.

Here you can see my normal range of motion, as demonstrated by my (yet unscathed) left thumb:


And here's how my right thumb has been resting:


And here it is when I strain to straighten it. This is as good as it gets! A few times over the past couple of months I've been able to "pop" it back into a position similar to the left thumb, but this comes with a lot of pain:


And so it was that I finally returned to my hand doctor, to be told that what I have is "Trigger Finger" on my thumb. This is basically the exact same thing as Mommy Thumb, just in a different location.

Thanks kids.

The treatment is the same- we start with a steroid shot (and oh did that sucker hurt like H***!!!) and hope that by reducing the inflammation, everything heals up nice and tidy and we're done. If the shot doesn't clear it up, we try a 2nd round of steroids before moving on to surgery to release the sheath that is restricting the tendon.

Obviously the shots and therapy didn't work with my Mommy Thumb, so here's sincerely hoping it works this time around with the Trigger Thumb!

No comments:

Post a Comment