What's the point of me getting up "early" after only 4 hours of sleep, if it never results in my going to bed earlier? Grrrr... I try to reset my internal clock but it doesn't seem to work.
Yesterday I was still up to see the sun rise before going to bed. It was pretty. It'd be nice to be able to see it every morning - but *after* a good night's sleep rather than before.
.
The doctor said I had trigger thumb, as I suspected. He gave me a cortisone shot in the thumb, which from what he said and what I had read, gets rid of the problem in the majority of cases. He said if the shot doesn't help within 3 weeks, it won't. It's been 2 and a half weeks, and it hasn't fixed my problem so I'm quite disappointed. Possibly it's because my problem was more extreme to begin with, not being able to bend my top thumb joint hardly at all.
The day after the shot, there was some improvement - I could bend the thumb, jerkily. But that only lasted a day or two, and then it went back to being stiff for most or all of the day.
The doctor said if the first shot didn't help resolve the problem for at least 4 months, he wouldn't try another shot. He would go to the next option which is surgery to cut the tendon pulley. I'm not ready to agree to that yet. I plan to take Vitamin B6 (P5P) supplements for a while to see if that helps any, based on some stuff I read, even if it is far-fetched. The thumb at least doesn't hurt most of the time, and I've already gotten quite used to the joint not bending like normal.
Yesterday, I was surprised to find that soaking the joint in warm water (which I read about and/or heard in a Youtube video) makes it loosen up to where I can bend it (jerkily) for a little while. The doctor didn't mention that, at least not that I recall.
A week or two before the doctor appointment, my hand was a lot more achy, so that it was even difficult to pick up things with the hand. My other hand started acting up too, which worried me even more. But taking naproxen helped with that and so far it hasn't gotten that bad again.
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