Friday, January 23, 2015

At least I haven't grown two heads and twelve toes yet...

 Just got back from the doctor. The MRI results are back.

The good news is that they didn't see any rips or tears in the muscle.

On the other hand, the preliminary diagnosis is something called tenosynovitis.

Often it happens in hands/fingers/shoulders, but for me it happened in my ankle.

The challenge now is to find a way to heal it.

When it happens in hands, they just put a splint on it and let it rest, and after a few weeks it's perfectly fine.

For crooked feet like mine, the situation is different because there's no way to completely let it rest. Even if I completely stay bedridden for weeks, the problem is likely to return the moment I start walking again.

My current leg brace just isn't working the way it should, so I have an appointment with a specialist on Feb 4th. She will (hopefully) be able to recommend a better leg brace which will actually keep me steady enough to heal better.

Tenosynovitis never heals if the tendon keeps getting strained. Repetitive injury (like me walking on a crooked club-foot which points inward AND rolls over to the side with every step) just makes it worse.

I'm not going to resign myself to being bedridden quite yet, but I'll be walking extra carefully for awhile, and we'll see what the specialist says on Feb 4th.


Additional medical update:
Also got the results of the sleep study I had a few weeks ago.

I only got about 3 hours of sleep in the hospital that night, but wow.
In that period of time, I had 96 respiratory disturbances, and stopped breathing completely 25 times. (!!!!!)

All night long, I only entered REM sleep for 16 minutes. (The normal amount would be about two hours).

At one point, my oxygen level was down to 80% because I stopped breathing so many times.
This is apparently the way I sleep EVERY night, which explains why I never feel like I get any rest.

So there's definitely a problem.

My next appointment with THAT specialist is on Feb 13th, and my 2nd sleep study is on Feb 20th. They're going to fit me to one of those C-PAP mask things.

2 comments:

nonamedufus said...

This is nasty stuff you're going through, Janna. Sending you positive vibes. Unless they wake you, in which case I'm sending good thoughts.

Janna said...

nonamedufus: Thank you for the vibes! It's ok. I was already awake.