On the neverending despair of injury

It can't get worse.... lol... hold my beer

So, this has been a rough year. There haven’t been any updates to this project because… there hasn’t been a lot of golf.

In January, I was hitting balls on the mat in my garage when I chunked a shot and hurt my wrist. I figured it was just sprained, and I took three weeks off from golf, hockey, and working out. It began to feel better after a few weeks of taking care of it, and in my first game of hockey back, I got slashed on the top of my hand.

A PT on my team looked at it and said it was probably sprained, and if it still hurt in a month, I should go to the doctor. Over this period, I still attempted to golf (not very well) and play hockey on it occasionally, resting it when it hurt. It just wasn’t getting better, I felt like a “pussy” going to the doctor and I finally gave in. X-Rays came back negative, the ortho said it probably is a bad sprain and ordered an MRI. To be blunt, the hockey player part of my brain said to myself, “This is a waste of time; you are just being a baby about this. Just suck it up, and it will get better.”

I am glad I didn’t listen to that part of my brain. I went and got the MRI, which shows one torn ligament on the side of my hand (which anyone who has played a ball sport or hockey probably has), and it looks like a damaged one towards the top of my hand/wrist area. The general orthopedist said he wanted me to see their hand specialist….

The hand specialist wasn’t available for another six weeks. FML

So off to PT I go. PT goes well, it gives me something to focus on and I diligently do my exercises, I begin to get psyched to see that this is headed somewhere and layer in the Fit for Golf Stretching regime. In my brain, I figure I will get past this and want to hit the ground running. PT progresses to the point where they give me a “return to golf program,” where I start out hitting and chipping and work my way up in distance and number of balls hit. I feel like everything is progressing. My hand still hurts, but the range of motion and other indicators show it is improving.

Then, I finally met with the hand specialist. This is how the appointment went.

He came into the room, manipulated my hand a bit, asked a few questions, and then said he saw my MRI, “You only have one torn ligament. The discoloration in the MRI on the top of the hand is not a torn ligament.”

I replied that that sounded good, so should I keep doing what I am doing, and I should be good to go?

“No, you have something called Kienbock's disease, don’t Google it.”

Then he walked out of the room, so of course, I pulled out my phone and Googled it.

“Kienböck's disease is a condition where the blood supply to one of the small bones in the wrist, the lunate, is interrupted. The lunate is a carpal bone. Bone is living tissue that requires a regular supply of blood for nourishment. If the blood supply to a bone stops, the bone or parts of the bone can die.”

So, all the PT I had done was pointless, and they wanted to immediately put me in a cast for three months. The problem was that I was leaving for a trip to Pebble Beach in two days, which I had originally gotten my stepfather for Christmas. (That’s another post for another day.) They agreed to wait a week.

I'm not going to lie. It kind of broke me mentally to see all the work I had put in basically get tossed into the trash. I fell off any routine I was doing before, and I put on about 8 pounds. My main social outlet and physical activity were golf and hockey. They were taken away with no return date in sight. It was demoralizing.

I got back and was in a cast with a port for a bone stimulator to try and spur blood flow to the impacted area. I was in that for three months, one month in they took another X-Ray and it “wasn’t getting worse”, then at the end of the three months they took a CT scan. The bone had not “collapsed in on itself” but there were still issues with the bone itself, however they felt like I could avoid surgery which could have less than stellar results and I would be out for up to nine months. They wanted to continue to immobilize the bone, but I argued against the cast, and they put me in a brace for another 3 to 4 months. My wrist had lost so much mobility being in a cast that long I had to start a PT program again… Overall, it is positive but still kind of depressing.

So that is where I am at. I have a follow-up doctor’s appointment in September, and then I hope to have progress and a clearer picture.

The one thing I do know is that my pity party must end. So, I have started running, which has been going on for the last two weeks. I am layering back in the stretching routine today, and then I am going to work on club-less drills, which I will document here. I need to keep myself accountable somehow.

So, what have you been up to?