Physical therapy
Jul. 8th, 2013 08:18 pmWeek before last my RSI started acting up again, this time at work. As it was so bad that I went home two hours early (pinching sensations inside your wrist are never a good sign), I conferred with my immediate boss and then submitted an incident report to the office of risk management. They got back to me, and asked if I wanted to see a doctor. I figured: might as well because over a decade ago I spent MONTHS with an extremely painful wrist interfering with my ability to do almsot everything I wanted to do at work and quite a lot I wanted to do off work and I didn't want a repeat.
As my doc doesn't do worker's comp cases, last week I went in to one of the clinics that my workplace uses for this sort of thing and got the diagnosis: the same old tenosynovitis (inflammation of the tendon sheaths). And THIS time I was offered physical therapy for it, unlike my treatment of over a decade ago, which was basically: wear a brace when you're sleeping or not otherwise using your wrist, take some prescription anti-inflammatories, and here's a Xeroxed copy of a page with some exercises to do. The brace helped a great deal, and was probably the best part of that whole treatment.
Anyway, I go in today through Wednesday, and then back on Thursday for a follow-up with the doc. My wrist has been feeling much, much better as I've been wearing the brace, so I got to feel vaguely guilty for going in when I'm not in acute pain, but as I explained to the therapist: I'd rather not spend months in pain down the road, which he agreed with.
The therapy consists of an hour of increasingly tedious (and tiring!) exercises for my right hand and wrist, the most entertaining of which is spending five minutes moving small hard balls around a thing that consists of a rubber sheet punched full of holes such that it resembles a Chinese checkers board (a game which is neither Chinese nor checkers). I amused myself by trying to recall a layout for the sort of peg-jumping game where you jump pegs and remove them from the board one by one, attempting to leave the last remaining peg in the center. Alas, I failed. I think. It's possible I remembered a layout correctly and just sucked at playing it.
At any rate, two more days of that. We can't have phones out, because of patient privacy regs and the danger that there might be cameras in the phone. There's two times when I'm literally sitting there doing nothing for a long time--heating my wrist at the beginning and icing it at the end for 8 minutes each--so I think I may bring a ZOMG actual book in tomorrow for those times rather than see if they'd accept a Kindle as a non-camera-bearing device.
As my doc doesn't do worker's comp cases, last week I went in to one of the clinics that my workplace uses for this sort of thing and got the diagnosis: the same old tenosynovitis (inflammation of the tendon sheaths). And THIS time I was offered physical therapy for it, unlike my treatment of over a decade ago, which was basically: wear a brace when you're sleeping or not otherwise using your wrist, take some prescription anti-inflammatories, and here's a Xeroxed copy of a page with some exercises to do. The brace helped a great deal, and was probably the best part of that whole treatment.
Anyway, I go in today through Wednesday, and then back on Thursday for a follow-up with the doc. My wrist has been feeling much, much better as I've been wearing the brace, so I got to feel vaguely guilty for going in when I'm not in acute pain, but as I explained to the therapist: I'd rather not spend months in pain down the road, which he agreed with.
The therapy consists of an hour of increasingly tedious (and tiring!) exercises for my right hand and wrist, the most entertaining of which is spending five minutes moving small hard balls around a thing that consists of a rubber sheet punched full of holes such that it resembles a Chinese checkers board (a game which is neither Chinese nor checkers). I amused myself by trying to recall a layout for the sort of peg-jumping game where you jump pegs and remove them from the board one by one, attempting to leave the last remaining peg in the center. Alas, I failed. I think. It's possible I remembered a layout correctly and just sucked at playing it.
At any rate, two more days of that. We can't have phones out, because of patient privacy regs and the danger that there might be cameras in the phone. There's two times when I'm literally sitting there doing nothing for a long time--heating my wrist at the beginning and icing it at the end for 8 minutes each--so I think I may bring a ZOMG actual book in tomorrow for those times rather than see if they'd accept a Kindle as a non-camera-bearing device.