Well, I built up muscle and things stopped hurting so much. Except my left wrist. Eventually, it dawned on me that this must not be a case of sore muscles, since it wasn't getting any better no matter. I wondered if it might be a touch of arthritis, since my grandma (and maybe my mom?) have arthritis. Craig got me those little handle things for doing pushups, but they didn't help at all (and they DID make doing pushups significantly harder!). And as the pain persisted, a little more research convinced me that maybe what I had was tendinitis, instead. I mentioned it at my last physical, and the nurse practitioner said that made sense. She said exercising wouldn't help, so just be careful with my wrists.
It's been amazing to me how many exercises use your wrists! Inchworms, pushups, crab reaches, walkouts, mountain climbers, burpees... A LOT of them rely on putting weight on your wrists! I figured out that if I held my hand a little differently, it helped a lot. Rather than having my palm flat on the floor, I'd put my weight on my fingertips, or hold that hand at an angle. It worked.
But I developed a lot more empathy for people with other body parts that hurt-- if I think it's hard to exercise with a bum wrist, imagine trying to find stuff you can do with bad knees or a bad back!
And then a few months after that, I noticed that I had a lump on that wrist! I'd just been assuming I was seeing my wrist bones, but the lump didn't match my other wrist! The two were noticeably different.
A quick google search told me that what I have is a ganglion cyst. And another visit with a doctor confirmed it. He explained that they used to treat these by bashing them with a giant book (hence their fun nickname, Bible Bumps!) and they've also treated them by sticking a needle in and drawing out the fluid, but he strongly discouraged both methods because all that does is form scar tissue around a cyst that will just grow back. He said the only thing that might work is surgery, and surgery is more likely to be successful if they're not dealing with scar tissue, too.
Around this time my wrist pretty much stopped hurting, so I'm not inclined to bother with surgery until it either a) hurts a LOT or b) gets a lot bigger and uglier. So hopefully we can kick surgery down the road a bit.
But a weird thing happened over Christmas break. I didn't find time to exercise at all, and my wrist got really sore again! Getting back to my workout routine this week (#Newyearsgoals) seems to have helped. Who would have guessed?
So now I guess I'm really on the hook to keep up with my exercising.
Anyway, I've started thinking of my cyst as Lumpy. It looks like we're going to be together for a while.
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