Week 10: Owww, owww, owww!

9 weeks, 3 days

So a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that there is something really wrong with my right hand. As in really. It’s fine unless you manage to touch (or breathe on, or pour water on – seriously) my right knuckle from a particular angle at a particular point – if you do that, it basically feels like someone has stabbed my knuckle with a hot knife. And once it’s hurting, my whole hand ends up hurting, and I have to stop using it for a while to calm the nerves down. It’s awful.

You know those times when you’re alone and you unexpectedly really hurt yourself, and you make noises because it hurts, but tend not to use words and whole sentences, since there’s no one there to hear you anyway? This hurts so badly I actually end up exclaiming to myself, “Holy shit that hurts!”, like God will somehow personally come down and fix it if he hears, because he messed up and didn’t realize it hurt that badly. (But in case you’re reading, Your Holiness, it really does hurt… I’d be really happy if you were feeling inclined to fix it…)

Anyhow. So I went to see the doctor about it a couple of weeks ago. She didn’t manage to trigger the excruciating pain, but felt around to see if anything felt broken. She wanted to X-ray it, though she doubted there was a fracture, and when I mentioned I was pregnant, the X-ray was out (obviously) and I was told to rest and ice it (and to splint it if I wanted, but there’s really no way to splint this, trust me…). Her thought is that it was some sort of tendonitis or soft tissue irritation related to being pregnant, and that we can just leave it be for a while.

Which would be fine if 1) I weren’t so clumsy that at least once every three days I end up hitting it on something, and 2) it didn’t still hurt like Hell if I look at it the wrong way. Given that they can’t really do much diagnostically to see what’s up because of the baby, I suppose I’ll just have to put up with it, but I would really hate to have a newborn baby, find out it’s not in fact the pregnancy, and only have one available working hand for baby-holding/breastfeeding/smacking myself in the forehead when I wonder what made me think reproducing was a good idea…