Life of Wry

All dressed up for surgery and nothing to surge. That was me today.

And I mean: I was outfitted with a gown, a nice paper hat, paper booties.. the whole nine yards. They’d taken all my vitals and had me tucked under a heated blanket, all prepped for trigger thumb surgery.  But then…

The surgeon came in and started asking questions about my thumb. He asked me to demonstrate range of motion and the positions it would get stuck in. He palpated and manipulated and kept asking over and over “in what position does it lock up?” It doesn’t lock up, I said. Sometimes it clicks as it moves from one position to another but mostly it just hurts like a sonofagun. He kept asking me about the locking. No locking. Finally he just outright challenged me on my diagnosis.

Not my diagnosis, I felt obliged to point out. It was the physician assistant guy I spoke to a few weeks back who came up with my diagnosis and a plan of attack.

He studied my x-ray and showed me all kinds of abnormal protuberances, misaligned bones and fuzzy areas that he said were signs of arthritis, and emphasized over and over (one over would have been plenty sufficient) that the surgery he was prepared to perform on me would do absolutely nothing to address any of it.

Well… to make a frustrating and slightly embarrassing story short, I forwent the surgery and left instead with this:

(I’ve since trimmed all that extra velcro and it looks a lot nicer.)

I’m to ice, immobilize and consume whatever I’m comfortable with in the oral anti-inflammatory category (having turned down the far more powerful injected anti-inflammatory solution… that godawful, painful cortisone shot that I was very motivated to avoid and apparently willing to substitute surgery for…much to his obvious dismay) and see if that does the trick.

And this is all more than fine with me.