How did all of this start for me?

Initially, I had what I thought was a work related repetitive motion problem. I had pain in my right upper arm that lasted for a number of weeks. It eventually made my biceps weak, and I had trouble for a while using my right arm to do anything. I should have gone to a doctor right then, but having been raised in a family that did not drop everything and run to a doctor at any sign of a problem, I just put it off. The pain eventually did stop. Or, it at least moved. The next stop for it was in my forearm, a few inches up from my wrist. That tenderness that developed there is what lead to my first lasting symptom. One morning at work, I tried to pick up a pen and realized that my fingers could not grasp it. I could move my fingers just fine, but the tips of my thumb, index and middle finger seemed to be paralyzed. Hey, Wake up! That got my attention in a hurry.

As I said this happened at work, and since I had been doing almost three times the usual workload as far as mouse clicks and intense schedules, I really thought this was a work related thing, and I hoped it was only temporary. I went off to our approved worker’s compensation clinic. They thought it was tendinitis. They were wrong of course, but if I had stuck with that diagnosis, they at least would have taken me off of work for a few days. That rest may have helped. But, they sent me to a hand specialist, i.e. Surgeon, who looked at my hand as I tried to make the “OK” hand gesture, and told me that I had a classic case of Anterior Interosseous Nerve Syndrome. He told me that if I felt I could still work, I should continue. It was a text book case of AINS. I was impressed about how much he knew about it. But, as it turns out, the one thing it appears he did not know, was that the best treatment for it was rest. Why was that? I already have said the answer. He was a surgeon. He wanted to fix me, but his fix involved an immediate tendon transfer operation. He told me I was way too old to have any return of function without surgery. I decided to wait it out anyway since even the surgery had no guarantee. I was only getting older anyway, and there was no age limit if I eventually decided to get the surgery.

This was a good decision as it turned out. I was just getting older anyway, so the waiting was easy. I worked my fingers constantly for two or three years trying to keep the tendons limber. I did it is downtime. I did it watching television. I did it when I was walking around at work. After two years, I got a burst of nerve sensation in my index finger. A month or so later, I could move the finger fairly easily. Then I got some movement back in the thumb. That is still the tough one. It takes real effort to get it to move at all, and there is almost zero strength in it. I figured I had this beat. It was only a matter of time before I could go back to this surgeon a number of years older still, and show him how well my fingers worked. My body had other things in store for me. As it turned out, as good a match as AINS was as a diagnosis, it was not the correct one. I still had weakness in my right arm. Doctors thought it was from lack of use since I had the hand problem. They were wrong about that.