DM Blog

I’ve been having significant problems with my right wrist for more than four years. The last two years have been especially bad. I’ve mentioned it a couple times on my blog and it was a major factor in my decision to take a break from selling charts online.

In 2013 I got an MRI of my wrist which revealed a full-thickness tear of my triangular fibrocartilage (TFCC), a partial tear of my scapholunate ligament, several small intraosseous ganglia and a large ganglion cyst. Quite a lot going on in just one wrist!

I needed surgery but was told it would be very high risk and that I might never play bass again, so it seemed prudent to try routine cortisone injections for a whole year first. Unfortunately, that didn’t help.

Then in March of this year I got another MRI done for comparison which showed lots of swelling and inflammation, tenosynovitis and a new, larger ganglion cyst right in between the joint. Here are some photos of the cyst that I generated using the OsiriX Imaging Software:

After seeing many different hand surgeons, all too afraid to perform the surgery I needed, I was extremely lucky to get an appointment on short notice with one of the best wrist surgeons in the world! Normally he has an eighteen-month+ wait list.

So last month I finally went in for surgery where he performed a wrist arthroscopy (diagnostic wrist scope), removed the ganglion cysts, repaired my TFCC and performed an arthroscopic synovectomy to clean up the inflammation in my wrist. It wasn’t a small procedure by any measure, but thankfully everything went well.

Here are some photos of me on the day of the surgery, resting in bed a week after with my two male dogs Lorenzo and Javier (Cachita my female dog couldn’t be bothered) and then a photo of the scar immediately after the cast and bandages were removed:

The scar was much bigger than I expected but it didn’t look so bad once I had a chance to wash up. And my recovery over the last four weeks has also gone immensely better than I anticipated.

I’m going to physiotherapy at the hospital’s hand clinic every week and I’m being told to expect about three more months of recovery time before I can start to play again. Wish me luck!