Whilst the exercises I was given to free the nerves in my arm have been helping with the feeling of pins and needles, over the last couple of weeks I’ve been getting increasingly frequent periods of my right elbow and shoulder feeling like I’ve done some sort of mammoth workout and like I’ve been left carrying a heavy weight around. It feels like I want to rest my arm on something to take the weight off the joints, but when I do that it doesn’t actually help.
Today the combination of pain from my back, pain and numbness in my arm and lack of a decent night’s sleep for far too long got the better of me and I had to finally cave in and accept I couldn’t work so that I could take some additional meds. It will be six years as of next week since I had my last operation, and last time off sick. Whilst it needed to be done, I had a massive sense of having finally giving into my condition, and also letting my colleagues down when we are so under pressure. It has been pointed out that both of those feelings are not valid (I have amazing colleagues), and whilst it took me about 2 hours to decide I had to do it before messaging my boss at 7.30 this morning, I do realise it was absolutely the right thing to do.
I emailed the Neuromodulation team to describe the worsening symptoms, and was very pleasantly surprised to get a call back quite soon after from the physio, Karen. She talked me through some tests and concluded that I might have some tendinitis in my right elbow and something I can’t remember the name of in my shoulder. Karen recommended I get an epiclasp for my elbow, and has suggested some additional exercises to hopefully help with my shoulder.