Family Picture

Family Picture

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

The One With Eric's Hand

Eric has a bum hand.
Like seriously. It's bad.
It's funny because when we were dating and newly married Eric used to laugh and tell everyone how I was the insane person who was always sick and having surgeries and had all this weird medical stuff going on but now that we have been married seven years the only times I have had to go to the doctor and have surgery have been with the deliveries of our three kids, which I feel is unavoidable. 
On the other side of this Eric has cut his thumb off, been extensively tested for multiple sclerosis, had shingles, had ulcerative colitis, had shingles a second time, had shingles a third time, and last year he had surgery on a cyst in his hand. 

Who really has the medical issues I ask you? 

Last September Eric's hand surgery started off our winter of surgeries (four in four months to be exact). The doctor went in and "de-roofed" the cyst and also performed a basic carpal tunnel surgery. Eric was in terrible pain for about six weeks and not speaking too harshly here, he was essentially useless around the house for longer than that. Which was pretty tough considering this was all occurring with in the same time frame of Paxton's mouth surgery and Preslie's emergency neck surgeries. NUTS I TELL YOU. The guy couldn't even change a diaper!!

So as he's complained still over the last year about his hand still hurting, I haven't been too jazzed by the inevitable idea of another hand surgery. It took us some time to get his medical records transferred to Dr. Kloss, but once we did he went in and met with him. Dr. Kloss ordered an MRI, which sadly didn't really show him much of anything because it was a contrast MRI and they didn't put the contrast in the right spot. He then utilized the MRI images and took them to his national orthopedic council (seriously) and used Eric as a case study. After about five visits, several lidocaine shots to the hand to track fluid flow, and an MRI that they finally determined that A: Eric's cyst had grown back and B: the flexor tendon on his pointer finger had become detached. 

Great news, right?
Ready for the even better news?

Going in and removing the cyst AGAIN was going to be no problem for Dr. Kloss who is a nation wide specialist in hands that graduated from John Hopkins (seriously the guy and his accolades are insane), BUT even this physician who is on the cutting edge in his field has only ever done a surgery to reattach a flexor tendon ONCE in his entire career.

Awesome.
December 10th Eric goes in to have surgery again.
Dr. Kloss told us that while he hopes that with this surgery Eric will not have a lot of pain the surgery to reattach his tendon will most likely leave him unable to use his hand for about 12 weeks.
Yes, you heard that right 12 weeks!!!
Ahhh.

Dr. Kloss also drew us a nice picture of what the incision lines on Eric's hand will look like . . . which basically takes up his entire hand.

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