About eighteen months ago I started having trouble with my right thumb. It was painful at the joint closest to the wrist, the CMC joint. I wore a splint for a while and took some NSAIDs, which would help, but on the whole, the situation was slowly worsening in my thumb instead of improving.
It wasn’t presenting like an injury, mostly because there wasn’t an injury that caused it. It was more like a general wearing out it seemed. I had my chiropractor look at it and he pressed in the meaty part of the ball of my thumb, asking if that hurt and I almost punched him. Yes, that hurt. The thumb was hyper laxative, or had too much movement in the joint but nothing was wrong that was really fixable.
Over time it would get worse and then better. For a while just using the thumb was a mess and I transitioned to typing on my phone with my left thumb and right index finger. At about that time I was getting the second steroid injections into my cervical spine to hopefully help with the issues I was having there and I thought I’d ask something of the doctor.
If there was any steroid left in the syringe, could he put the remainder in my thumb? Sure, he said. My thumb did get a bit better, but it returned rather quickly to its prior state and now had a disconcerting clicking when I used it along with the pain.
It was time to get that referral to the hand doctor my chiropractor had talked about, I decided. I got in fairly quickly and after a manual exam and some x-rays he confirmed it was general degeneration. The spacing in portions of the joint had been reduced, which was the clicking I was feeling as cartridge was wearing down. I also had two osteophytes or bone spurs, one which had appeared reasonably recently and was noticeable from the outside.
I was already following his recommendations, but since I got some relief from the steroid injection, he said let’s try a second one. As a forewarning, if you don’t want to hear about a needle, skip the next paragraph.
He had the nurse take my thumb and pull it outward, increasing the joint space before doing the injection. He missed every nerve somehow as he put the needle close to an inch into my thumb, injected about 5cc’s of lidocaine and then 10cc’s of steroid.
And I marveled at what he was doing, because the other doctor, an expert in the spine, wasn’t a hand doctor. And the other doctor didn’t get the steroid in the same place. He said it would help some, which is why I got partial relief in that case, but he suspected this would help more.
It’s been two days now and my thumb is almost asymptomatic. It barely hurts. It was so worth it. The injection should last for four months and I can go back for another one if needed.
The Big Boy Update: My son was eating his dinner the other night when I asked him if he needed any catchup for his fries (which he historically used a lot of). He said, “I don’t like catchup and fries together. It’s like a bad combination for my taste buds.”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter ran in her boosterthon fun run today. All the boosterthon staff knew her and said she was so much fun. They would go around the class and down the hall and high five the students but since my daughter couldn’t see their hands she decided to have them say, “apple!” and she’d reply, “starfish!” No one knew why, but it was their tradition. My daughter did win the top fundraiser goal, something that she’s very proud of. Our thanks to friends and family who helped support her in her race to raise money for her school. My daughter wrote thank you notes in braille to everyone to thank them personally. She and I had fun working on the notes together.
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