Ulnar Nerve/Elbow Surgery 2005-2006

Welcome

Hi! I'm Michelle!

In mid-2005, I was diagnosed with Cubital Tunnel syndrom. It's no fun. By the end of 2005, I had Ulnar Nerve surgery. Basically they untucked my jammed-up nerve in my elbow and moved it to a different part of my arm, so it won't get all tangled up anymore.

Ouch.

When I was going through it, I could find very little information about what to expect at any point in the process, from diagnosis through healing. So I started tracking the information on my personal blog.

Well, my personal blog has pretty much fallen by the wayside. However, this is important. I remember how lost I felt when I couldn't find any information, I didn't know what my arm would look like, what I would be able to do in the first few weeks after surgery ... So I resurrected these posts and photos and placed them here on Posterous. It's just a short blog and they are excerpts from the larger work that was my personal blog, so remember that they're slightly out of context. 

As with all blogs, the posts are chronological. Happily there aren't many, so you can either start with the healing on this page and work backwards through the diagnosis, or page back a few and start with the diagnosis, working your way forward.

It's 2009. I still have spots on my arm where I have no feeling whatsoever. It's sort of strange, especially when getting a massage during a manicure, but that's literally the only time I notice it. I really don't need to have feeling on the underside of my arm. In the scheme of things, it's a pretty tiny price to pay. Sometimes, when I've been working (ie, typing) really hard or when the weather is funky, I'll feel strange sensations running up and down my arm. But it's not painful, just odd.

Email me at wrtgirl[at]gmail[dot]com if you have questions.

Cheers,

Michelle

Bendable Things

I'm debating on returning to the brace the original elbow dr prescribed me. It didn't help at the time, but it may help now. Currently, if I sleep with my arm too bent or too straight, its very, um, creaky to get it back to a good position. The brace would train it, I think, to be just right.

A lot of folks - women like me, mostly - are finding this site. They are chock full of questions about the surgery and the recovery. Like me, they found very few useful answers online. There is more about the diagnosis than the treatment and recovery. Here on this blog you'll find excerpts from my overall personal blog and you can read through the process from this post all the way back until the diagnosis, complete with photos. (Remember that blogs run in chronological order, so the most recent post is first.) 

For those of you in search of information, everything I went through - good points and extreme lows - are there. There was one extreme low, about 2 weeks after the surgery, where I wasn't really blogging (it hurt!) but my nurse practitioner assured me I was normal. It was just the inability, for about 3-4 weeks to not be able to do the little things such as eat with my left hand (I'm left-handed), write, curl my hair, and the shocker for me, fasten my own bra. It devastated me in a way for which I was unprepared.

So be prepared. Recovery is not easy, but I was back at work - as a technical writer - within 4 weeks. Full recovery (if this is full) is still ongoing, but it's almost May and surgery was in December. The biggest thing to remember is after about 2 weeks of doing nothing, get out of that drug-induced haze and try to start doing normal life things. Every day I tried to curl my hair, fasten my bra, and eat with my left hand, and every day I got closer. If you just sit around and wait for your body to do it for you, you'll heal slower. Your arm needs to know how far you're willing to push it. Seriously.

Elbow Update

specially after my previous post, I should probably offer an update on how my elbow is healing. I know this blog gets lots of hits on Ulnar Nerve Transposition. (Click here to view all the posts if that's why you're here.)

The update is that I'm not sure how my elbow is doing. It's different on any given day.

The actual elbow area - on the outside where the groove-like bone is -burns like hell a lot of the time, especially if I've been typing a lot. (And when aren't I typing?) Sometimes, it burns for no reason. This burning wraps around my arm, like an armband, to an exact spot on my scar that happens to be slightly greenish on close inspection. The dr's say that'll fade (the color, not the burning).

My pinkie alternately aches, hurts, and goes utterly numb. Now remember, before the surgery, my ring finger and pinkie were tingling and numb-like. The tingling is now gone. Completely. No tingling. Numb, though? Got that in spades. The ring finger is alternately perfectly fine and numb. Never quite as numb as my pinkie though.

And sometimes I have limited feeling. For instance, it hurts when you poke my pinkie with a pin, but it doesn't hurt near as much as it should. I think this is my most common state. I still don't have much strength in my pinkie and when I type a lot, I notice that my control over both fingers is minimal. I no longer have flawless  and fast typing like I used to. It's still fast, just far from flawless.

My forearm, underneath, is numb and sometimes painful. It's a strange combination. Supposedly it will take up to 2 years to get feeling back in that area. That's what a nurse told me. It's a very hard sensation to get used to, and when that area of my arm touches something, I tend to jump or back away as if I've been burned. In reality, I'm just incredibly freaked out that I know I touched something and I didn't feel it at all.
There is still a little swelling underneath that groove-like elbow bone. Sometimes there's swelling above that, near my triceps. When that happens, I shut down and just cry, because it's really painful and I can't function.

My dr doesn't have an answer. Is this normal? I ask him. It's not unusual to acquire different symptoms, he says. WTF? That's the only answer I could get out of him, this dr that I trust and really like.

Sigh. Like I'm not cranky enough already with the not-sleeping thing.

Yesterday, I saw my Primary Care Physician who basically said my body was apparently out of warranty and that I had every right to be p.o'd at my surgeon. My PCP prescribed me, among other things, some cortisone to help with the swelling and sort of give my arm a jump start.

Maybe I am worrying too much about all this. It's just that I thought I'd heal faster. I never have had any patience, and this is trying what little I have. And I worry that I'm not healing at all. The surgery is known to have varying results. Maybe I'm one of the variations.

I don't think the scar looks that bad, and people who have seen me throughout the whole thing aren't phased by it either. It's on the bottom of my arm, so you really have to be at a certain angle to see it. Scars don't really bother me (although I'd freak out if I had one on my face). I see them as stories waiting to be told. But I was wearing a short-sleeved blouse when I was visiting some friends at an office the other day and they completely freaked out about the scar. Maybe it's worse than I thought and my family and close friends are either really polite, just used to it, or remember what it looked like when I first took that bandage off.

Elbow Photos: March 3

Here it is on March 3. It's always slightly redder, like this, fresh out of the shower. My arm is flipped over, as if I'm extending with my palms out. That's really the only way you can see the scar, as it's on the bottom of my arm. 

PTSD

I haven't slept well since the surgery and there have been several nights where I haven't slept at all. I've always been sort of nocturnal, going to bed late, or waking up in the middle of the night and not going back to sleep. Before the surgery, I'd been taking Lunesta and was starting to wean off of it and sleep like a normal person, which was nice. I stopped taking it after the surgery because I didn't want to mix it with pain killers and now my sleeping habits are all over the place.

I've also had weird stomach cramping a lot. Turns out the not sleeping, the stomach problems, and the worrying (which extends to a lot more things outside of the surgery) are all connected.

Yesterday I left the dr's office with drugs to treat it all and a return appointment scheduled. Let's hope that there are sunnier days ahead. I imagine sleeping like a normal person again will make a huge difference.

Elbow Evolution

Because some of you are sadists, and some of you are just curious, I've posted photos of my elbow healing. It's icky. Don't feel compelled to look.
I've posted it because 1) the elbow really is healing nicely and 2) there's no information on this out there.

When I tried to find out how I would feel AFTER the surgery, there was no information. Ulnar nerve transposition surgery is fairly irregular, and the information is limited. I wanted to know how my bandage would look, what my scar might look like, and how I would feel. There was nothing. So now, on the off chance there's someone else looking for that stuff, there's a little something that I hope is informative as well as icky. I did caption the photos, you know.

As the elbow continues to heal, I'll continue posting photos. The photos aren't the greatest since it's not only hard to take a photo of the inside of your elbow, it was hard to do it with my right hand.

Oh- how do I feel? Well, I definitely have good days and bad days. My guess is that I've been typing too much the last few days because I'm in a lot of pain today. A lot. But I'm really done with just sitting around the house too ... We'll just chalk today up to a bad day and I'll go rest.

Elbow Photos: Jan 18

This was taken about 1 month after the surgery. You can see how much smoother the scar is. At this point, it's safe to say that it looks better than it feels most of the time. I credit Vitamin E lotion for the scar healing so nicely. The bruises, while not completely gone, have definitely shrunk. I have feeling in parts of the arm where I didn't a week or two ago, but my fingers are still strange feeling - especially the pinky finger. Also, it hurts to stretch my arm out or up.

Elbow Health

As far as my elbow goes, I'm a lot better. I'd put me at about 65-70%. That's probably about right, considering that I've got about 2 more weeks before the wound is officially healed.

I'm typing better, but I also can only type for short periods of time, or my ring finger gets shooting pain. The pinkie is better and even felt normal for about 2 minutes the other day.

I can almost eat with my left hand again, can almost fasten various female accoutrements all by myself, and can now use both hands to shampoo my hair.

All is looking up.

cruisin'

since typing time is limited for me, here's the update on what's been happening since christmas.

- for xmas, we went to my grandma's in indiana. it was pretty relaxing and we had a good time. we also caught the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe while we were there. washington, indiana, has an old-fashioned theatre on main street, with two very tiny screens. it's incredibly cheap to see first-run movies there. i liked the movie and was impressed by how true they stayed to the book. (i'm re-reading the whole series (thanks kara!) and am just about done.)

- kevin got me some wonderful gifts, including a rowlf the dog muppet puppet from 1978 and a tiffany's bracelet. yay kev!

- my elbow and hand are slowly improving. it's a little more each day. i had a few really depressing days this week. i can't do things like wash my hair with my left hand, bring a fork to my mouth with my left hand, and so forth. all sorts of things you'd never think of (like fastening a bra) are hard for me. no one realizes how much they depend on their elbows ... anyway, i had a follow-up appointment yesterday, where i discovered that i'm normal, that nerve surgery takes up to 6 or more weeks to completely heal, and that i can't even start therapy for another 4 weeks, as the wound takes forever to heal (due to the location on the elbow). i still have a lot of trouble in my pinkie. there's also a new numbness in my arm that is freaky and could take up to 24 months to heal. we'll see, i guess, if this surgery and pain was worth it in my long run ( i won't get a claw hand, i guess).  in the meantime, it's painkillers and gauze for me.

- my body has been so busy trying to heal my arm that it let it's guard down elsewhere. i seem to have caught one hell of a cold. this is so not fair ...

- we've been checking out information on our cruise. turns out our oceanview rooms were "accidentally" changed to interior closets, er, i mean rooms, under the main staircase. the ship is sold out and we can't change the rooms back. hopefully the claustrophobia will not kick in ... having never been on a cruise, i have no idea what it will be like or how small those rooms will be. we leave sunday for miami and sail on monday. we'll be back in town late next saturday night.

- we're spending a relaxing new year's eve with kate and ben. it should be fun - it sounds like ben is whipping up quite the gourmet dinner for us and we're providing wine. it's also close to home, which is handy since we're off to the airport early the next morning.

my arm is starting to throb, so i'm going to stop typing. i'm wishing everyone a happy and safe new year's!

Elbow Photos: Dec 25

Merry Christmas! It took a couple of days but we got finally got all of the sticky stiches off. It wasn't pleasant. If you ever have stiches like that, use a cloth dipped in rubbing alcohol to remove them. You can still see the discoloration - that yellowish tint. That's a combination of bruising and betadine that it hurts too much to get off (rubbing at my arm is not a pleasant thing). It's ugly, isn't it. I can't quite whip out the vitamin E yet, as the wound is still open and scabbed in a couple of places.