u/wm91

Hello,

I don't know if this is the right sub for this, but it's what shows up when you look for this injury on reddit.

Last year I tore the ecu subsheath in my dominant hand due to leaving it untreated for months (a doctor told me it was tendinitis, turns out it wasn't). I had a repair surgery and after a whole year of recovery, I can say my hand feels better than ever. I went back to regular exercise recently.

My other hand has always felt somewhat unstable, but I didn't get any pain of it, just mild discomfort and weakness, and some uncomfortable sensation in the ulnar side while doing some movements like checking my watch. Recently I started to feel like something was not right, my forearm felt quite strained and my wrist was feeling weird. A visit to the surgeon, MRI and ultrasound later, I have a bad ecu subluxation in the right wrist as well. The MRI results talk about "chronic" subluxation with the possibility of the subsheath being completely torn, since there are no signs of trauma or inflammation, and my ulnar bone is completely flat, there is close to no groove for the tendon to sit there. The tendon seems to be completely fine, it does not jump or snap unless you actually grab it (I guess since the bone is flat there's nothing to get caught on).

I had an appointment with my physical therapist and he checked it with an ultrasound. He believes that I might have live with that since a long time, and I'm now feeling discomfort due to the strained muscles. His opinion, without being a surgeon, is that a repair might be difficult there since there's no groove to put the ECU back into, and that it might be better just to train the forearm muscles to get better stability.

Now I'm waiting for the appointment with the surgeon in 2 weeks. I'm quite disheartened right now. The recovery from the previous surgery was quite miserable, with lots of pain, and just when I was getting back into my normal life I get hit with the same, but it seems to be even worse. I don't know what will be the approach of the surgeon, I get the feeling that he will suggest to just fix it, which means going through the whole process again, and I'm not sure if I should attempt it or follow the advice of the PT. Right now I have some pain in the whole forearm, and using the mouse and keyboard is uncomfortable, specially when I have some ulnar deviation.

Has anyone any experience with this kind of situation?

Thanks in advance.