Old Injuries Flare Up

Since my college days when I worked at Eddie Bauer, I've had carpal tunnel syndrome. I've been able to manage it with magnets or braces now and then. If it gets really bad, I'll stay off of the computer for two or three days and it's fine. I may not have the pain again for months or even a year after a good break from computer work. Yes, I use a natural keyboard (most of the time.) I make sure my mouse doesn't have a scroll, but rather a joystick type piece, and have a low profile mouse for my British (a.k.a. small size) hands.

Riding the bike I've begun to notice my wrist pain now and then. I've been wearing a brace at work (when I'm on the computer the most) and paying attention to my wrist so it doesn't get too bad. Unfortunately, when I ride and get tired, I tend to lean on my hands. This means that my wrists take a lot of my weight while I ride and they feel the force of all of the bumps I hit with the bike. I notice when I do it, so I work on sitting up more, pulling more of my weight off my hands, and will even declare a break time if I need to really shake out my hands because they're getting numb.

Last week, I spent a day on the laptop as I worked from home. Not the best posture, sitting on the couch with my feet up and the laptop literally on my lap. Plus the square laptop keyboard! So, I know my carpal tunnel is swollen and have been bracing it and babying it a bit to get the swelling to go down. I even managed to stay off of the computer, except for a couple brief reference searches, for the weekend. Sunday's long ride seems to have aggravated my wrist though.

It's only my right wrist, and I blame that all on ten-key (order entry) and mouse work (graphic design). Sunday afternoon I iced my wrist for a bit and that seemed to help. Monday I was still a bit weak in the wrist. Something as simple as zipping a zipper is a challenge if there isn't one of those zipper pulls attached to the head of the zipper. It doesn't look like anything is wrong. I can grasp things, but when it comes to lifting anything with weight to it, or putting pressure on something, I feel like I'm accomplishing the task, but I come up short. For example, I was washing my hands in the bathroom and went to push down on the soap dispenser. No soap. Now these things do break a lot here at work, but it was working Friday, so I try again. Nothing. I cross-over and push with my left hand. Boom! Soap squirts out! Ok, I'm a weakling. I struggled through lunch to hold my fork to eat all of my salad. I actually switched to my left hand to pick up the big pieces of broccoli.

Now it's time to do some research and determine if it's just carpal tunnel. Is it a poor fit in my bike and might improve when I get a road bike? I don't know. I can't afford to take a week off of my bike training to give my wrist the rest it is accustomed to getting when irritated. It may be time to finally consider the carpal tunnel surgery. That realization means I'm not young anymore as my reason for not getting the surgery before was that I was too young to do so. You can only have the surgery once and you can still get it again if you don't watch your activities.

The simplest tasks are causing me to struggle this week. I can't drink my liter bottle of water with my right hand. By the way, I had no idea this was something I always do right handed! The combination of brushing my teeth and then brushing my hair today meant there was no strength left for a barrette, and don't even consider doing any make-up. Truly putting my day solution on my face after the brushing was a challenge. I even over flowed a water bottle this morning because when I tried to close the water jug, it simply slid on the counter.

I'm open to tips. I'm starting my research to see what my options may be. I don't have time for the surgery before the ride in October. I can't take the six weeks off of riding to heal. I'm working on some core exercises to strengthen my core so I won't lean on my hands as much. Where does this leave me? I don't know exactly. I'm definitely going to be paying attention to it and trying heal before it gets worse.

Goals
Today's Miles: 0 (core exercise done Monday morning instead)
Total Miles Achieved: 210.4
Financial Investment: $863.55
Total Weight Loss: 0