carpal tunnel

August 10, 2003

Sandy,

I may have already posted on this. If so, just ignore me! Anyway, I have

carpal tunnel syndrome in my right wrist. It flares up terribly when I use my

hands a lot, drive for long periods of time, and/or have problems with fluid

retention. I wear a brace at night that has metal in it. It keeps you from

bending your wrist a lot during the night. During the day I wear a little brace

that is made from lycra and has a velcro strap that goes around the wrist. When

my wrist/hand is bothering me, I can tell a difference the minute I put the

brace on. Both braces came from walmart. The one with the metal is around

$10-15 for each hand. The lycra ones come two in a pack for $7-10. I keep one

of the lycra ones in my car, one in my purse, and a couple around the house. I

just throw them in the wash in a lingerie bag and then let them air dry.

By the way, when I drive for a long while, the pain is really not in my wrist,

it is down my forearm. Other times the pain is sometimes in my wrist, sometimes

in my hand. The ortho says that all of it is from carpal tunnel. He told me

that if it gets to the point that it is waking me up at night or to where I can

no longer tolerate the pain, he can do surgery, but for now he'd recommend I

just try to deal with it because I have so many medical issues. I think that

once they get my prednisone down to a lower dose (or stopped completely) my

fluid retention problem will go away and the carpal tunnel syndrome will

improve.

Best of luck,

W

August 10, 2003

I do not know if you are interested but I had the surgery for carpal tunnel

on both hands, one at a time and I did not feel it was a big deal. I have

had five attacks of acute pancreatitis and my pancreatus was not affected.

The hardest part was it was hard to use my hands for a while after the

surgery.

Myrna

-- carpal tunnel

Sandy,

I may have already posted on this. If so, just ignore me! Anyway, I have

carpal tunnel syndrome in my right wrist. It flares up terribly when I use

my hands a lot, drive for long periods of time, and/or have problems with

fluid retention. I wear a brace at night that has metal in it. It keeps

you from bending your wrist a lot during the night. During the day I wear a

little brace that is made from lycra and has a velcro strap that goes around

the wrist. When my wrist/hand is bothering me, I can tell a difference the

minute I put the brace on. Both braces came from walmart. The one with the

metal is around $10-15 for each hand. The lycra ones come two in a pack for

$7-10. I keep one of the lycra ones in my car, one in my purse, and a

couple around the house. I just throw them in the wash in a lingerie bag

and then let them air dry.

By the way, when I drive for a long while, the pain is really not in my

wrist, it is down my forearm. Other times the pain is sometimes in my wrist

sometimes in my hand. The ortho says that all of it is from carpal tunnel.

He told me that if it gets to the point that it is waking me up at night or

to where I can no longer tolerate the pain, he can do surgery, but for now

he'd recommend I just try to deal with it because I have so many medical

issues. I think that once they get my prednisone down to a lower dose (or

stopped completely) my fluid retention problem will go away and the carpal

tunnel syndrome will improve.

Best of luck,

W

August 11, 2003

,

Thanks for replying. I am not happy of the prospect of more surgery,

even if only for my wrists. So for now I will deal with the pain. It

can be quite painful at times. But I tend to relate ALL pain levels to

my pancreatic attack pain and if it isn't that bad, I tend to ignore

it. For good or bad, thats what I do now.

When my doctor asked how painful was it I pointed and told her this is

pain (pointing to my pancreas) and then pointed to my wrist and arm and

said compared to that, this is annoying! :-)

Thanks again,

Sandy

Weston wrote:

>Sandy,

>I may have already posted on this. If so, just ignore me! Anyway, I have