Just over a year ago, I injured my wrist. I went to bed pain-free and woke up with a sharp pain in my right wrist. I found this strange, but I flexed it and got on with my day.

Over the next few weeks, it got worse. As we had just gone into lockdown, the thought of going to see a doctor was not a priority. I turned to the next best option. Google. Or Dr. Google as my husband calls it.

I diagnosed myself with Dequervains. I called my husband’s physiotherapist and talked through my symptoms with him, and he concurred – without physically or virtually seeing me.

I bought a wrist guard and iced my wrist and statistics stated that it would take 6 weeks to heal.

2 months later, the pain was better but not completely gone. I was bewildered. And I noticed something else. The bone in my wrist, closest to my thumb, seemed to be growing. It was protruding more than normal. Strange, I thought to myself.

Fast forward to 2021. A year into my wrist pain I thought it was time to see a doctor. My pain never went away and got worse with certain movements. I decided to see my husband’s orthopedic surgeon. We had got to know him well from the time he treated my husband, and I knew I could trust him to advise me.

The diagnosis

He took a nanosecond to look at my wrist and said that sheath covering my wrist’s tendons was inflamed. It was inflamed and stuck to my tendon! I was shocked.

An inflamed sheath can look and feel as hard as a bone, I thought to myself. I asked him if an x-ray would help. He told me that would be wasting my money. And that there was nothing much I could do about it.

I needed to let the inflammation settle (with time by avoiding movements that aggravated it!) and perhaps try some physiotherapy.

The last resort would be an operation to free the sheath from the tendon. It would have physical effects he mentioned. Another option was a steroid injection to reduce the inflammation of the sheath. Both of which we both felt was not warranted at this stage.

I walked away from the consultation a little bewildered. I was wondering what caused this, why it took so long to heal and if it would heal at all.

I spoke with the physiotherapist and he too was not sure how he could help me because he needed to get to the cause of my pain. He wondered why the inflammation had not subsided for over a year. Typically, he said inflammation subsides after 2 months.

My overthinking

But the purpose of my writing this article is to highlight what I did next. After I consulted with the orthopedic surgeon, my wrist was still in quite some pain and the protruding ‘bone’ seemed to get bigger. It was now beginning to consume my thoughts and there was a niggling feeling that the surgeon missed something.

The thought was always in the back of my mind and it was affecting my work. Too much of my conscious brain was thinking about my wrist.

So, I found a clinic with x-ray facilities near my home and went for an x-ray. The General Practitioner (GP) examined my wrist ‘bone’ and authorised an x-ray. He was not alarmed but thought there was cause for concern.

The x-ray left me speechless. My wrist was perfect as far as the bone structure was concerned. Even the GP was a little taken aback. The protruding ‘bone’ was soft tissue.

My lesson

In a nanosecond, as I looked at the x-ray image, I knew the orthopedic surgeon was right. He knew it was an inflamed sheath and he did not want to waste my money.

I wasted my money by myself.

But it was what I had to do to stop wasting time on thoughts that were beginning to consume my cognitive bandwidth!

And in a nanosecond, I got my answer. Like night and day, my conscious mind was freed up of wrist thoughts.

My physiotherapist had suggested that I get a second opinion. I sat on the fence with that because deep down I knew that the surgeon’s diagnosis was correct. And I was not sure who to see for a second opinion. Finding another doctor that I could trust became the focus. Not the focus I wanted.

The x-ray did not answer my questions as to what caused my pain or when it would heal but my phantom thoughts of ALL the potential problems with my wrist evaporated in an instant! It was my second opinion.

Like a switch I was focused on looking at potential solutions and even open to giving it time, with fewer movements, to heal.

Thank you, errors

My wrist episode reminded me of Nassim Taleb’s book, Antifragile, and a particular paragraph on errors.

He writes. “the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. If every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution – so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course, you make discoveries along the way”.

That summed up my experience. Ok, perhaps it was not rationality that got me to the x-ray clinic, but it was the notion of an error in the diagnosis that had me looking for a solution.

Mine literally, was an expense to negate ‘an error’.

I have certainly made discoveries and I am closer to a solution but not quite there yet. But as my wrist gets better, I am beginning to realise what is not working.

You and your errors

Wherever you may be overthinking a scenario in your mind, please, either get a second opinion or perform rational trial and error using your errors to get to your solution!

Because anything is better than your current overthinking state!

I am here to help!