Archive for the ‘medical history’ Category
My medical history III: the feet.
I thought that I hurt my feet with bad shoes when I walked all around Europe in the summer in 1993. Since then, I tried really hard to get shoes that made it so I didn’t have terrible pain all day. Turns out that such shoes do not exist. Between pronation, extra-wide feet, sausage toes and what is either repeated toe breaks or intense amounts of joint swelling, I have been limping for the first few hours of my day for about 6 years.
My medical history II: the fingers.
As a pianist, the finger pain really got my attention. It started in my left index finger, at the knuckle where the finger attaches to the hand. I had broken this knuckle as a boy, when I punched my brother in his knee (he was sitting cross-legged, and my hand shattered). I lied to my parents about it (not cool to get hurt while punching one’s brother), and it went a long time before a doctor saw it. It was x-rayed eventually and was found to have been broken and healed, I think.
The finger pain was sharp, pulsated, and was accompanied by swelling. The joint looked bad.
Over the course of several years, the left thumb, the right thumb and the right index finger got involved. The worst was the left thumb joint where the finger attaches to the hand. It immediately swelled to twice its size, and hasn’t come back since.
After about 10 years of pain in my left index finger, I grew a nodule on the knuckle. That was proof to my doctors that something needed to be taken seriously. It had to do with the joint tissue swelling up and out of the joint.
It pissed me off that I had to have an externally visible, abnormal looking,kind of gross thing on my finger before I could get doctors to take my fingers, and the pain that they were in, seriously.
My medical history I.
My medical history is getting long, so I am going to include symptoms that are relevant to arthritis and psoriasis. I had neither as a child or young adult. When I was 20 years old, I experienced sharp pains in my lowest left rib, where the rib goes from bone to connective tissue. The pain pulsated, the rib felt warm to the touch.
In my early 20’s, I developed small amounts of eczema under my eyelids, which responded well to a topical cream that could go near your eyes. I also had eczema on the glans, which was treated with Protopic. Check out their weird website (Itchcraft? http://www.protopic.com). Several times I had hydrocortisone-type steroids in cream for prescribed for eczema, and they did not work as well as the Protopic for me.
