Hi
I’ve started an office job and have noticed some mild pain, seemingly something like tendonitis in my index finger. I’ve experienced tendonitis before, when I was in university while sitting exams i started to get hand pain from writing for too long, and too quickly/intense. My doctor just said ice it, take anti-inflammatories and take time off which I did. A few months later I noticed I was getting pain in my index finger similar too now. Again I tried ice, anti-inflammatories, and rest.I tried some other things like heat and rolling around the muscle around the thumb but that did absolutely nothing. I also tried sleeping with a wrist splint, which might have helped a little but I’m honestly not sure. It kept cropping up to the point where I just bought an iPad to do university work on.
Anyway, as for my current pain, I’ve been at this job about 3 weeks but only properly started working as normal last Friday, so I was surprised it already started up. I would have thought it’d been so long that it was kinda gone. On wednesday (yesterday) at about midday it started to get bothersome, like a very mild burning/tingling sensation from clicking, to the point where I switched to using my left hand for the mouse for the rest of the day. The pain is mainly in the knuckle joint at the base of the finger, and also in the finger joint closest to the nail. Also get a muscle tightness feeling in the muscle in my palm between the index and middle finger. I iced it at home in case that would help. I should also mention while my job is on a computer all day, if I had to rate it in terms of intensity with respect to mousework Id rate it pretty mild. I used computer game all day in my teens for long hours and get 0 issues so I’m surprised this brings anything on.
Today I tried using a pack of wet wipes we use to clean our desks as a makeshift wrist support, which seemed to actually make it a little better surprisingly. I tried googling, which can get you anything really, and one article said for carpul tunnel symptoms, resting your wrist on a padded wrist support wasn’t good because that would just be compressing nerves. So instead I tried resting the top of my forearm (up by the elbow) on that pack instead, with my hand higher on the mouse so that the centre of my palm was on the highest part of the mouse and my hand was overall more on the mouse, which seemed to genuinely make a good difference. Towards the end of the day there was a lil bit of mild pain though, which got distracting, though if it doesnt get worse I’ll get over it.
Training is not affected at all. Deadlifts, rows, pullups all feel fine. My hand felt a lil numb yesterday from the day at work, but there was no effect on training at all. So it seems like it might be just a specific positioning/posture problem, but I’m honestly just shooting in the dark at the moment.
I have 2 questions:
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do you have any idea what is going on
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do you have any idea of any equipment that may help. I’ve seen mousepads with a wrist support (like this https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/pe8AA…lwM/s-l300.jpg) and I’ve also heard getting a bigger mouse can help, and also seen something called an “ergonomic mouse” (like this http://handshoemouse.com/news/wp-con…eless-hand.jpg). Id happily shell out money for one of these if it significantly helped. Are you familiar with any of it.
Lastly I should mention that while Ive read all of Austin’s work on Pain Science and definitely did my utmost to not catastophise and approach this as he recommends, this does stress me out. Alot. I’m pretty much at my dream job and love it and everyone is so nice and really don’t want it to fall through cos of hand pain