(no subject)

Scott picked up my library holds last night, so we have a few movies to try. We started and discarded one but really fell in love with Kubo and the Two Strings.

He also bought a cheesecake tray, and we all had some. It was still frozen, and my hands were hurting a lot, so I didn’t get through my slice until about 8:30.

My hands hurt from about 3:00 onward yesterday. I put on my braces and tried to minimize using my hands. They’re not so bad now, but even buttering my toast last night was difficult. (I’d picked toast as not too likely to be hard on my hands. I forgot that the margarine was currently hard.) I made fudge in spite of the pain, and the braces helped a lot with that in terms of keeping my thumbs out of the process of stirring things.

I’m seeing a PA at the orthopedics clinic today. Hopefully she will have some suggestions for something that will help. The braces help me not use my thumbs, but they also make things hurt a good bit more. Naproxen doesn’t help even the slightest bit, and my primary care doctor is wary of me taking it anyway, given what the genetic testing turned up. If it actually helped, I’d likely take it anyway since I’ve taken it on and off for thirty years without ill effect (apart from last fall during radiation). I rather suspect that there isn’t any reasonable medication that will help. Rest is very difficult to manage while still dressing and washing myself and typing anything at all, but it’s probably all that will actually help. I just don’t know if I can.

(no subject)

Damn. What I thought was tendinitis is actually arthritis, so I can expect the problems with my hands to get worse over years rather than better over weeks.

I have two new sets of spica splints, one for day and one for night because arthritis in the particular joint where I have it destabilizes a bone, the bone between the base of the thumb and the wrist. That moving is the source of a lot of my pain. Of course, I’m supposed to keep moving as much as I can while still using a splint to keep that bone in place.

Treatment, apart from the splints, would normally include NSAIDs, but first off, those don’t help my pain, and second, they’re on the list of things that my body is genetically predisposed not to metabolize properly. So it’s heat and hoping at this point. They can do steroid injections, but there’s a limit of two (I think per joint) in a lifetime. The PA said that, if I get to a second injection, they’ll already be scheduling surgery. The surgery for this involves removing a bone and filling the space with tendons harvested from elsewhere in my body. They don’t like to do it because it tends to weaken the hand, but many people who have the problem find their hands stronger after the surgery simply because things were so bad before.

I’m not keen on the surgery, but I’m 49, so it may well happen eventually. Right now, I’m having trouble with mugs of tea, books (including paperbacks), and typing. Oh, and opening jars and using a can opener and stirring things and writing anything by hand. The idea that this is going to be with me permanently almost makes me cry.

The PA says there’s no research showing benefit from glucosamine but that, if it wouldn’t interfere with my other medications, she saw no reason not to try it as some patients find it helpful. The Mayo Clinic page on glucosamine interactions gives me the impression that there may be issues for me because of the problems I already have with metabolizing medications along certain pathways. I’m not willing to give up either Tamoxifen or Singulair, both of which are already on the borderline because I’m genetically predisposed to metabolize them poorly.

All of the listed things are 'may' be problems instead of being expressed with more certainty, but the list is kind of long and scary. I just can't tell if that 'may' means 'there's some evidence but no research' or 'we have no idea, so we're going to list everything we can think of that might, even theoretically, be a problem.'