ganglion cyst no more

so for the last few years, i have had on and off pain in my wrist(s). i wondered if it was maybe carpal tunnel, but decided it wasn't. then thought maybe it was just some random tendinitis. but wasn't sure. i used to help teach a tumbling class, and i remember trying to help a girl fix her cartwheel technique. i did one to show her how she was doing it wrong, and then was going to do another to show her how to do it correctly. well i barely made it through the first one, and i'm pretty sure the second one didn't look any better than the first. bending my wrist back and putting weight on it like that caused so much pain it just about landed me on my face. you should've seen me trying to do push-ups.

then one day in july (sounds like the beginning of a song, doesn't it?), i was chatting with my sister about this dumb wrist pain, and showed her the little bump that seemed to stick out more when it was hurting more, and she's like "oh, well it's probably a ganglion cyst. i've had one of those before."

duh.

i knew she must be right. she had the exact same symptoms and pain and stuff that i had, and it totally made sense. so a couple of weeks later, after a bit of research, i decided having years of this lame pain was enough, and i called the ortho guy that had just done some surgery on my mom's fingers and made an appointment. i assumed they'd be able to aspirate it, as they did on my sister's years ago, and from what i read, they did a lot of times for these types of things.

not so fast.

it was, indeed, a ganglion cyst, but it had become too hardened to be able to aspirate. it had to be surgically removed. without much hesitation, i said sign me up. i was ready to be rid of the dang thing. they wanted to schedule it the day before we left for malaysia. ha! i told them that just wasn't going to work, so we scheduled it for two days after we got back.

my surgery call time was 5:30am (eek), and i had it done in same-day-surgery at LDS hospital. the cyst was about the size of a large grape, and was mostly down in my wrist rather than poking up above my wrist. i guess they had to do some digging and moving of tendons and such to get it all out. hence my fingers are pretty sore when i move them. i remember trying to wake up out of the awful fuzziness of the anesthesia in recovery, and then they took me to Jae in another room. i was anxious to wake up and just go home to sleep. we left around 1:30pm (i think...that day is a little fuzzy) and Jae took me home. him and Zoey took care of me, and i was back to work 2 days later (boo).

it's an awful, straight-out-of-surgery kind of picture, but i had to show how cute miss pup was. she stayed/slept right by me all day.

got to sport this for 2 weeks. makes hair washing awfully difficult.

not the greatest picture, but my thumb bruised right up, and so did my knuckles on my fingers. my thumb looked like i was rockin some special tan line or something.

finally, after having that cast/splint/thing on my arm for 2 weeks, i got it taken off, got the stitches pulled out, and was sent on my way. it's been sore and stiff, but it's healing. oh, and geez, talk about some scaly, dry, peeling skin.

this is from today! i still feel like my hand is bruised, but it's definitely on the mend.