Lack of Pain Resolution

I found out the wrist brace wasn't actually helping my hand when it started going numb despite the brace, so I stopped wearing it, but I haven't been having problems with major numbness in either hand for a while.

I didn't actually wind up seeing a vascular surgeon. It turned out the appointment was with her PA, who spent about two minutes with me and then told me she'd ask the surgeon what we should do. What a total waste of time and money. The vascular surgeon referred me to a rehabilitation specialist. He thinks a muscle in my neck might be too tight and is restricting blood flow in my arm. He did the EMG test on my neck and there was a little activity, so he decided to do a numbing injection. When he did the EMG again to see where exactly to do the injection, there wasn't any activity anymore.

I don't think the muscle in my neck is really the problem, especially since the numbing injection did absolutely nothing for my arm pain. He prescribed lidocaine patches or cream. The patches were way too expensive, so I tried the cream a couple times a day for a week, and then four times a day for another week.

It seemed like my arm might be getting a little better, but it wasn't exactly a controlled study because I also stopped practicing sentences with hard words. For some reason, that's when my arm always hurt the most, so I figured maybe I was doing something during that time to make it worse and I might as well stop and see what happened. As a further experiment, I stopped using the cream, since it was kind of a hassle to put on four times a day and it made my neck itch (probably from my hair sticking to my neck all the time). My arm didn't get any worse at all, so either the cream did help and the positive effects haven't been reversed by not using it for the past two weeks, or it didn't help.

I told the doctor that the shot didn't do anything, but he still wants me to try having a Botox injection to see if that helps, so my appointment for that is on 11/1. I tend to sleep with both of my arms under my head/pillow, so I've been focusing for a few weeks on trying to sleep over my shoulder less, and off of my arms more.

Sometimes when I'm writing I can get into a pretty good spot where my arm almost doesn't seem to be a problem. But I think that's always been the case, so it's not really improvement. It doesn't hurt much during the course of daily activities, but it never has. Showering is still the worst. My arm feels pretty bad after I do that, and if I try to write right out of the shower, it's a disaster. It's like I don't have any strength in my arm at all. Doctors always do strength tests, and they don't find any weakness on the left side, but it really feels weak/like I can't hold it up/use it at all when I try to write.

My hand doesn't go as numb when I do serratus punches and another weighted exercise, so I think that's a good sign. But I haven't been doing a lot of writing lately, really. I do maybe an hour a day of hard stuff, and that's pretty much it. I don't do any realtime on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Most of the time, I still feel like it's a pretty big hindrance to my ability to work.