Wrist Surgery

I briefly mentioned in a comment on Steve’s Battle Creek post that I was having wrist surgery. Here’s a follow up with more details.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had numbness in my right ring and pinky fingers for over six months. I first noticed it sometime after my pneumonia bout. I wasn’t sure if the numbness perfectly coincided with the pneumonia or not because there was enough other things bothering me that a little finger problem was easily overlooked by me.

At some point in the process of regaining my health, I noticed the numbness. At first I thought it was from spending too much time on my computer – since that’s about all I could do (I was thinking carpal tunnel syndrome but it turns out carpal tunnel affects the other fingers). I tried a couple of home remedies but they didn’t work. At my two month checkup with my doc, I mentioned the problem. He diagnosed it as probably ulnar tunnel entrapment (he was dead on there).

It turns out that there are three likely spots that the ulnar nerve can get entrapped – the wrist, the elbow and the neck:

My doc said that the rapid weight loss that I had could have caused some things to shift around and caused the nerve to get pinched up by my elbow (turns out he was off on the location). He said to wait until I gained the weight back to see if it would go away. If it didn’t he’d send me to a specialist.

Well it didn’t go away, so he arranged some additional tests. I had an EMG (Electromyography) where they stuck a punch of pins and needles in me to run an electric shock up and down the nerve path to figure out what was getting through to where.

The EMG showed that the problem was in my wrist which was a little unusual in that most times the blockage occurs at the elbow. In a way that was good news because it’s a lot easier to get at the nerve in the wrist than it is anywhere else. The bad news was that physical therapy can’t do much for the wrist problem and surgery is pretty much the only course (waiting it out to just hope it goes away is another).

So I went off to see an orthopedic surgeon who confirmed the diagnosis and scheduled the surgery. BTW – my surgery was done by Paul Suhey, the brother of longtime Chicago Bear running back Matt Suhey. The operation was Tuesday a week ago. Basically, what they do is to partially cut the ligament that’s causing the pressure on the nerve. Scar tissue will eventually fill in the gap in the ligament but it should reduce the tension in the ligament enough that the pressure will no longer be on the nerve and it will regrow.

Unfortunately, the regrowth is a long process. The doc said the nerve will probably regenerate at a pace of about 1mm per day. Since I’ve got about 5-6 inches of affected nerve that means it could take 5 months or so to completely heal (1 inch equals 25.4 mm, so 6 inches would be 152 days).

The surgery was done on an outpatient basis and I was conscious the whole time (although they didn’t let me watch the actually cutting of the wrist). It was kind of weird because I could feel him doing something down there but there was no pain involved.

The whole procedure only took about 10-15 minutes and I was good to go. They wrapped my wrist up in kind of a brace and sent me off. I had some oxycodone as a pain killer but only took that for a couple of days. I basically had no restrictions in what I could do. The doc basically said that the brace will prevent me from doing anything that could actually damage the wrist. His quote was “If you can do it, it’s ok to do it”.

Here’s a little video of what I’m walking around with at the moment.