Who Needs a Wrist, Anyway?
No matter how much you try to appreciate your body and all of its abilities, you don’t truly appreciate something until its gone. I don’t even have a good story for how I injured my wrist. “I got in a fight with a clown” is what I really want to tell people. But the truth is that I woke up one morning and my wrist hurt a little, like I’d slept on it wrong. Instead of getting better, it just worsened throughout the day.
The main problem was that when I’d rotate my wrist, I’d get a sharp pain. I could hear things grinding and clicking in a way wrists are not supposed to grind and click. It was not pleasant. When I could just rest it, it was fine — so at least it wasn’t constant pain. But do you know how many things require rotating your wrist? Damn near everything in life. Opening doors. Putting babies down for naps. Opening the refrigerator. Using a can opener. Impersonating Beyonce as one does. It also hurt to put much pressure on my palms, so pushing a stroller or shopping cart or lawn mower were much more painful or out of the question.
I skipped the doctor because I figured they’d just throw me in a brace and tell me to wait and see, so I threw on a wrist brace for a few days and mostly tried to take it super easy. I started high-fiving with the left. I let my hubby mow the lawn. I racked my brain trying to figure out what I’d done and came up with two possibilities. It’s probably a combination of overdoing it on our newly installed pull-up bar (more on that in a future post) and repetitive stress from parenting. My youngest is almost 11 months old, and baby wrestling requires a decent amount of wrist, apparently. Each time I’d do something baby-related, I’d get the fun pain, so I started adapting workarounds like using my forearm to support the baby when laying her down in her crib, or using my left hand whenever possible.
Luckily for me, after giving it nearly three weeks of rest, it’s improved a lot, but I’ll probably give it a couple more weeks before I attempt push-ups or pull-ups again to make sure it’s 100 percent. Right around the time I was feeling sorry for myself and my injured wrist, I started following surfer Bethany Hamilton on Instagram. She’s the one who lost an arm to a shark in 2003, but got back on her surfboard just weeks later. She just became a mom recently, and I made a mental note to be thankful that I was only down a wrist because how crazy would it be to try to parent with one arm? She’s an inspiration and a testament to turning lemons into lemonade. So instead of focusing on what I can’t do, I’ve been focusing on what I can. So yeah, maybe my hard-fought pull-up improvement will be set back a notch, but I can still move my body and get out and move, right? Right.
Ever had a mystery wrist injury? How long did it take to feel back to normal? —Erin