Bilateral wrist tendinopathy and many other symptoms success story.

Hi, I'm Brian. In the summer of 2022 I got what appeared to be tendonitis in my right wrist, then a month later, in my left. I attributed this to excess of PC and console gaming and playing guitar for hours on end.

Some relevant context: My favorite YouTuber went through something the same thing before I did. Editing his videos, gaming, and playing instruments seemed to cause tendonitis in his right hand, and switching all the load onto his left gave him the same pain in his left hand. Seems like this effected my subconscious and I grew fearful of that debilitating pain in my wrists.

The day I developed pain in my left wrist, I immediately developed severe anxiety about it. My favorite YouTuber had already had tendonitis for over a year at that point, and I just knew this pain would last for months or possibly years. I followed the doctors orders: rest, ibuprofen, braces. Then occupational therapy. None of this helped.

My anxiety about having lasting wrist pain and not being able to enjoy the hobbies I love spread into a different kind of anxiety. Severe health anxiety. I worried that if I got tendonitis twice so easily, there must be something wrong with me systematically. This became full blown hyperchondria, or "cyberchondria" as I googled things that made tendonitis more likely and one by one convinced myself I had them all. One doctor suggested I had EDS because my elbows hyper-extend. Then I developed pain in my elbows, forearm, and the back of my hand. I also kept waking up with numbness in the bottom of my hands. I was sure I had nerve damage, as these spots were linked to the ulnar nerve.

I thought maybe it could be peripheral neuropathy from diabetes, as that result comes up constantly upon googling virtually anything, and as I worried about that I developed a need to pee constantly.
But then I got my blood sugar tested and that symptom disappeared as quickly as it started. At that point I knew logically it was anxiety that caused that, but that didn't stop the anxiety, or my fear of nerve damage from other causes.

I noticed crepitus in my thumbs, and then a week or so later developed pain in my thumb. Then the rest of my fingers.

I had an EMG to test for nerve damage and it came back with nothing.

This was around the time I discovered John Sarno and TMS. This helped me convince myself I didn't have the diseases on some level, but the "What If" was still to powerful to embrace it. I thought if I embrace the idea of it being psychosomatic and I'm wrong I could make my tendinitis worse, or I could miss something irreversible or life threatening.

Someone mentioned ALS and I became afraid of ALS. Twice in January of 2023 after getting up from sitting on my left leg in my papasan chair, my leg gave out. I crashed to the ground, tried to get up and crashed to the ground again. Exactly the same both times. Now I REALLY thought I had ALS. I developed twitching all over my body, and tremors in my hands and fingers. My knees would shake if I leaned over to reach something. Eventually I managed to convince myself it wasn't ALS. Since my leg never gave out again, and the tremors seemed to only come when I got worked up about my health.

Next up was MS. This one resolved quickly. I thought I had MS because I read that with MS you could feel a sensation of wetness in your fingertips. It resolved immediately because the wetness I was feeling was sweat from anxiety, and once I could see the sweat on the screen of my phone I knew it wasn't a false sensation of wetness from a nerve misfiring. It was sweat. Because anxious people sweat. This was a huge win. Once again I gave myself an apparent symptom of the disease I was fearing and once again it vanished as soon as it was proven not to be that.

I had an MRI on my wrists after waiting for several months, and it game back with nothing.

Now most of my symptoms started to slowly resolve. Twitching and hand/wrist pain stayed. The rest only came up when I got worked up. But I was still sure my tendonitis was real, despite the MRI. The hand surgeon told me it was just some intermittent tendonitis. So I kept resting. I kept avoiding the PC and my guitar.

That was almost a year ago. The pain stayed with me. Getting better slowly, but just a little but of PC use and the "tendonitis" would flare up. So I kept avoiding it. But not anymore. I saw someone on here say that any tendonitis pain that last more than 6 months is TMS. I bought The Divided Mind and I took the leap. Just a couple days ago in fact. I fully embraced the business as usual approach. No more avoidance. Just like that, severe pain has become a very mild discomfort. The fact I typed this whole thing without any sort of break is my proof to myself that Sarno was right. A month ago even a little computer use would have caused me pain probably for days, because I feared it would. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

It wasn't easy to throw out the conventional wisdom that tendonitis that doesn't resolve within a couple of weeks is "tendinosis". That your tendon is just permanently damaged and the only way to fix it is to strengthen the good tissue around it no matter how long it takes, but the results speak for themselves. More pain relief in a few days of fully embracing the concept of TMS than in 1.5 years of trying to "strengthen the good tissue" while avoiding anything that might cause repetitive stress.

I hope the medical community will catch up and stop scaring people like me into thinking they have irreversible damage when really they have just conditioned their brain to think there is, and they keep reinforcing those subconscious fears it instead of retraining it. Especially when a professional has done an MRI and sees nothing but healthy tissue.

 

thank you for sending this, i get wrist pain when playing guitar so yeah