I’m back on track with the paper. It’s due tomorrow night by 11:59 p.m.

I am going to call it a night tonight since I did about 2,000 words this evening, after returning from my follow-up visit to the orthopedist.

The diagnosis is still incomplete. My pain hasn’t disappeared and the spots where it remains quite tender and sore and ouchie are not consistent with Kienbock’s OR carpal tunnel syndrome OR tendinitis (which I’ve been spelling tendonitis for years, but which is apparently wrong.)

Doctor Rob (as the nurses refer to him) gave me a shot of DEPO-MEDROL® with Lidocaine (a synthetic analogue of cortisol) into the OTHER tendon in my forearm. I can’t remember the proper names, but last time it was the one on the “outside” of my wrist (close to thumb), and this time it was the one on the “interior” of my wrist (close to pinky finger).

A few minutes later, he had me press on my wrist again to see where it hurt, and there was still the spot of pain sort of at the base of my wrist - where the two fleshy pads at the bottom of my palm meet at a “V” at my wrist. Still pain. And he said, “This is a weird case.” But I am coming back in another few weeks to see how it’s feeling then, since the final effects of the cortisone shot should be manifested in two days.

I iced my wrist for about 10 minutes when I got home, fired out the 2,000 words of this paper, and now I am in pain and am going to stop typing and get the ice pack again… and go to sleep. If I get up as early tomorrow as I did today (5:30) I might get out of bed instead of reading for an hour and work on my paper in the morning.

Yeah - it’s strange. The last few days - perhaps because of stress - I’ve been a sort of morning person. Getting up before the alarm… not feeling like I need to go back to sleep. I still have little to no appetite and didn’t even finish my salad at lunchtime (though I did load it up with lots of good things like tuna, grilled chicken, tomatoes, cucumber, baby spinach leaves, broccoli, olives and chick peas - no dressing, because all the tasties were more than enough) and just had a mug of homemade tomato soup for dinner. There was a little tubettini pasta in there, so it wasn’t broth alone. But still… not sufficient.

That said, it’s time to go to bed and relax. It’s the only way I can focus on getting this paper done… relax and deal with it. I can finish it up tomorrow night. Only 500 more words… I’ll even email it to myself at work in case I want to spend my lunch hour hacking away at it.