I blame John Elway

Mike Stafford

Member
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2,299
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Coastal plain of North Carolina
Yes, I do blame it on John Elway. I had never heard of it until I started seeing those commercials that had John Elway speaking about his problems with it. For months on end, I saw these Elway commercials about how this non-surgical method would correct the problem caused by it.

Well, now I have it…in both hands. Yep I have Dupuytren’s Contracture aka Viking Disease aka Trilgger Finger medically identified as stenosing tenosynovitis. It hurts to even say that.

I guess I came by it honestly as part of my genetics are of Viking origin. My grandmother, my mother’s mother was a first-generation immigrant from Sweden. So, I am only one generation away from the heritage of pillaging although I don’t feel much like pillaging.

On my right hand it is affecting my ring finger and on the left it is bothering my middle finger and limits my ability to make a visual insult. It is always something. My doctor tried to treat the right ring finger withy cortisone injections. The first one did nothing but the second worked for about 5 weeks. Now I have so much fluid in the tendon sheath that I cannot bend it without a lot of pain. It is always something.

On top of that I have been diagnosed as having carpal tunnel in both wrists. The heel of my thumbs on both hands has been losing muscle mass and that is because of the carpal tunnel restricting blood flow.

In February I will be having surgery on my right hand to correct both the Dupuytren’s and the carpal tunnel. Supposedly that hand will only be out of commission for 10 days or so. It must really hurt as the surgeon says he sometimes has to prescribe oxycodone for the pain for some patients.

Sheesh…..it is always something.
 
Are you taking Statin Drugs?
It was causing this, and other symptoms of stiffness throughout my body, and they kept trying me on different ones until they had tried them all. The first that they put me on was Lipitor, and I was on it for almost 2 years, getting stiffer and stiffer. Then my wife saw a David Letterman show where he was having the same symptoms and they had finally figured out that the Lipitor was causing it. I stopped taking it immediately, and 2 days later I was having significant improvement. I had been getting around with 2 canes because I was so stiff, and no longer needed them. I had the finger problems too, and it went away in less than 2 weeks. So they tried different Statin drugs on me and I had similar, but different, problems with every one of them. I now don't take any. My argument with my doctor was "as best as I can find out, high cholesterol has never killed anyone, but these Statin drugs are making me wish I was dead." I won my case and no longer take any. For me, the side effects from these are sneaky and come on very slowly, so you feel like you are just getting older. Try stopping for a few days to see if you feel an improvement.

My goal now is to live as comfortably as possible for the rest of my life. My doctor's seem to want me to live as long as possible to make as much money off of me as possible. When I have a problem with anything that they are now giving me, I tell them, and try going without it to see if it is really causing problems. If it is, I let them switch me to something else. If that causes problems, I tell them, but then don't take their prescriptions any more. This has been going on with me for 22 years. I'm almost 80 now. Will I live to 100? I doubt it, so why should I suffer with the side effects from their drugs, supposedly to keep me living longer. With the way things are going in this World, I'm not certain that I want to be part of it that long anyway.

Charley
 
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I have it, and had it for quite some time in my right hand. Mainly the middle finger. Makes it painful to shoot the bird at someone now. Have to use my left which seems to not have as much meaning. :rofl: Months ago my physical medicine doctor gave me a steroid shot in the right hand. Actually she shot me with the stuff in two locations on the inside of the hand along the middle finger track or whatever it is called. Worked wonders. When I saw her six months later, she asked how it was and it was, truly great. So she just shot the knees up and all was well. Of course about two weeks later, it started back up again. phhhhtttttt. So, when I see her again, the shots will be in the worst knee and the hand.
 
Are you taking Statin Drugs?
It was causing this, and other symptoms of stiffness throughout my body, and they kept trying me on different ones until they had tried them all. The first that they put me on was Lipitor, and I was on it for almost 2 years, getting stiffer and stiffer. Then my wife saw a David Letterman show where he was having the same symptoms and they had finally figured out that the Lipitor was causing it. I stopped taking it immediately, and 2 days later I was having significant improvement. I had been getting around with 2 canes because I was so stiff, and no longer needed them. I had the finger problems too, and it went away in less than 2 weeks. So they tried different Statin drugs on me and I had similar, but different, problems with every one of them. I now don't take any. My argument with my doctor was "as best as I can find out, high cholesterol has never killed anyone, but these Statin drugs are making me wish I was dead." I won my case and no longer take any. For me, the side effects from these are sneaky and come on very slowly, so you feel like you are just getting older. Try stopping for a few days to see if you feel an improvement.

My goal now is to live as comfortably as possible for the rest of my life. My doctor's seem to want me to live as long as possible to make as much money off of me as possible. When I have a problem with anything that they are now giving me, I tell them, and try going without it to see if it is really causing problems. If it is, I let them switch me to something else. If that causes problems, I tell them, but then don't take their prescriptions any more. This has been going on with me for 22 years. I'm almost 80 now. Will I live to 100? I doubt it, so why should I suffer with the side effects from their drugs, supposedly to keep me living longer. With the way things are going in this World, I'm not certain that I want to be part of it that long anyway.

Charley
No Charley, no statin drugs; my cholesterol stays in the 170-180 range. Never had a cholesterol problem which is unusual for a fat Viking. :p

I probably earned these ailments from years of weight lifting and damage through sports injuries. Who knows why people get what they get? Even the Shadow doesn't know.

I also don't have complete fingerprints on most of my fingers on both hands. This is attributed to many years of woodworking and woodturning. I have partial fingerprints which are still considered to be unique of course. The last time I was fingerprinted the technician was flummoxed at the results as my prints were incomplete. She went to her supervisor and I overheard her telling the technician that old guys like me have worn away their fingerprint ridges. "Old guy."..to my face she called me an old guy. Well, harumph, I say to that.
 
Don't have that fancy sounding condition but I do have loss of feeling in first two fingers of both hands. Checked for carpel tunnel but shockingly that was not the issue. Doc said it's a nerve in my neck. Live with it. The loss of feeling does create priblems trying to pick up small items but I guess just tolerate it. It all goes with living to the ripe old age of whatever. Beats the alternative.
David
 
Don't have that fancy sounding condition but I do have loss of feeling in first two fingers of both hands. Checked for carpel tunnel but shockingly that was not the issue. Doc said it's a nerve in my neck. Live with it. The loss of feeling does create priblems trying to pick up small items but I guess just tolerate it. It all goes with living to the ripe old age of whatever. Beats the alternative.
David
My issues with numbness started with my first chemo treatments with oxaliplatin. Then it just got progressively worse. My doctor thought the chances were good that I would regain my feeling when the chemo was completed. Well, it did not get better.

Later the numbness was exacerbated when I was proscribed ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic, for a UTI. I only took it for three days but the numbness in my hands got much worse. Never returned to what was my normal numbness... Like I said, it is always something. I have a lot of difficulty picking up small items. I have to watch what I am doing or I can't pick it up at all.
 
Welcome to the Duputryn's club, my Scandinavian brother. :wave: My mom and dad had it; one of my sisters and I both have it. Back in the '70s and '80s my mom had "microsurgery" on both of her hands in an attempt to fix it, and in all cases it just came back worse. (And her hands were both a scarred-up mess.) By the time it showed up in me, the prevailing course of action was to either treat it with injections or just do nothing. It got so bad in one of the joints on my right-hand pinky that I couldn't even straighten that finger out to a 90º angle, so they did surgery to fix it. The techniques have improved since my mom had her hands operated on, and so far that finger is much better. I had another nodule on the right hand that they did the injections on to break it up, and that has seemed to work so far. I have several other nodules that are still growing, including a couple in my left hand that will eventually start to affect my guitar playing.
 
Interestingly with mine, I don't have any trouble holding larger things or even my turning tools. But sometimes it is a job hanging on to a fork or spoon. Weird. I'll just live with the injections unless it gets really, really bad. Besides, I need an excuse to see my physical med doc. She's a hottie!!! :):)
 
I don't have trouble holding larger things either; with the trigger finger I have trouble turning them loose. But if you were to place a dime on the table I would have a lot of trouble picking it up. I just can't feel these things because of my chemo induced neuropathy..

My cadre of doctors have tried everything from various drugs and vitamins, TENS, soaking my hands in hot wax, acupuncture and physical therapy all to no avail.

By the way my hottie was the young woman who administered the hot wax treatments at the spa.

Fortunately I am blessed and trips to the bathroom have not become an ordeal. :p:ROFLMAO:
 
Hmm, I don't seem to have it which I probably can attribute to my English female ancestor being extremely swift of foot and outrunning the invading Vikings.
Coffee on the monitor!!!!

@Mike Stafford - Yikes! I battle a bit of arthiritis and nothing that makes our hands work against us is welcome in our craft. Old injuries (and habits) have a way of calling back later in life. I hope things work out well.
 
I don't have any problems with the trigger finger, though the wife does on occasion.... my biggest problem is when I drive... I drive primarily with my left hand, (may stem back to the days when we drove with the left hand and had the right arm around our girlfriends???)... mostly I hold the steering wheel at the 10 o'clock position and after about 20-30 minutes that hand will go numb.... sometimes it's had to even feel the steering wheel and with the back roads here in Tennessee it would be a good thing to know where your hand is on the wheel. If I drop my hand down to the 7 o'clock position, the numbness will dissipate, but I'm not comfortable with driving that way for very long. I don't feel comfortable driving with my right hand, even though I'm right handed, I just don't feel the control I do with my left.
Another problem is I'm beginning to get lower back pains, just above my butt... feels like I've been standing bent over slightly for a long while.... that seems to cause pains down my left leg, kinda like a charlie horse... on the inside a little above the knee, sometimes moving around to over to the top of the thigh in about the same plane. I can work at the lathe for a couple of hours before I have to give up.... Years ago when I was still a desk jockey, I would come home from work with a sharp intense pain between the shoulder blades and actually have to lay on the floor sometimes to alleviate some of the pain... that's gone now that I'm retired and not hunched over a desk for 10-14 hours a day.

I think Betty Davis said it best.... Getting old ain't for sissies.

Speaking of the viking ancestry, does Finland count? Most of my heritage comes from western Europe, England, Ireland, Scotland and some German, but I had a DNA test and it showed up that I have about 1% Finnish blood.... looking at the family tree, no idea where that came from. My mother's family has been in America since 1628 and my father's family came a few years after that. My Paternal grandmother was 100% Irish, her parent were both born in the old country.
 
My earliest ancestor on my father's side of the family was a Sea Captain with the Dutch East India Company.
He made several trips between Holland and the trading post where Manhattan is today, then brought his family over and established a farm in the Flushing area of Brooklyn about 1600. His family later obtained a Patent (Ryck's Patent) and sailed up the Hudson River to near where Peekskill, NY is today and settled there. A few years later they bought the land in that area from the Indians for a deal better than the Manhattan purchase so well publicized in the history books. The Patent date for Ryck's Patent was 1637 and It included about 17,600 acres. I read that the Indians really didn't understand the purchase, but accepted it, and then never moved off the property, becoming close neighbors with the Dutch settlers there. I grew up on a very small piece of that Patent (50 X 150') in a home that my dad and his 5 brothers had built following WWII.

In tracing my ancestors via Ancestry.com I have gone back to 1460 and have about 17,600 names in the tree now, from both sides of my family, and most are from the Hudson Valley in NY. The Sea Captain's last name was Abram, but soon after settling in the US he had changed it to Van Lent, meaning from Lent, an area of Holland. In the early 1800's, most had dropped the Van from their names, and so it is today.

I became interested in ancestry when I began to wonder about my grandfather's father, since no one in the family had ever talked about him. Through my search I found that he had died when my grandfather was about 5. He had been a maintenance man for a local company that made fabrics and wall paper and he had died in his early 50's in about 1886 (no exact death date available). My grandfather was born in 1881. It was so easy to find this information that I wanted to know more, and have been adding to my family tree for about 20 years now. My mom's side of the family arrived from England in the late 1800's. Most were hatters (hat makers), but there were woodworkers and tradesmen on both sides of the family.

Charley
 
Genealogy is very interesting... one of my mother's cousins traced her family back to 1628 in Virginia... I've started on my Father's family but haven't done much with it lately. I'm having trouble finding my great-great grandfather past Tennessee.... pretty sure he came into TN via South Carolina, but haven't found any record of him there yet.... need to spend more time working on it.
In my mother's family, one of her ancestors was the high sheriff in Virginia, not sure where... In the Richmond area there's a house that Grant used as his headquarters when he took Lee's surrender that one of my ancestor married into.... I understand that today the house is a historic museum or something. The daughter of that marriage was married to Thomas Jefferson. Mom's family started moving west and wound up with relatives in Oklahoma and Texas.

My Paternal grand father was born here in Tennessee, but his family along with a number of his in-laws all migrated to Texas shortly after the civil war. My dad was born in Texas as was I.... Politically I'm not happy with Texas about now, but I wound up in TN following my wife's daughter and our first grandchild... her husband was offered a job with the Mars candy company and they moved here in 2000 or 2001...we came up to visit and loved the area and bought our house here in 2002.... finally retired and moved up in 2005.

Noting your name, even though I go by Chuck, according to my dad, my birth name is Charley..... but the doctor wrote Charles on my birth certificate which irritated my dad something fierce.. he demanded I get it corrected.... never did.. The family still uses and calls me Charley, even though I've gone by Chuck since 1960 when I went in the Navy.
According to Dad, I was name after his favorite uncle, Charles Calvin Copeland or as Dad called him, Uncle Charley Copeland. The Copeland name shows up fairly prominently in my ancestor searches.
 
"Noting your name, even though I go by Chuck, according to my dad, my birth name is Charley..... but the doctor wrote Charles on my birth certificate which irritated my dad something fierce.. he demanded I get it corrected.... never did.. The family still uses and calls me Charley, even though I've gone by Chuck since 1960 when I went in the Navy."

Chuck,

I was named after my father. so I'm junior, though after his death I saw no reason to continue adding that to my name. Actually, today is my dad's birthday January 21. My mom started calling me Charley very early in my life, and taught me how to spell it with the "ley" as the last part. Every other Charlie that I knew through much of my early life spelled their nickname "Charlie" and even 2 of my teachers said that I was spelling it wrong, to which I replied, "but that's how my mom taught me how to spell it". So, I've continued to do so, and later in life I've actually met a few others who spell their nicknames the same as me, even one girl, but she usually spelled her name Charly, although not always. I kind-of like being "different" than most anyway, but some never seem to catch on to the fact that I spell it differently, and continue to refer to me as "Charlie", even after I point out the difference to them. So after the first 70 years of dealing with this, I've mostly given up and now accept either spelling, but when I write my name myself it's always "Charley". Many in similar situations don't use their first name and go by their middle name or just their initials because they don't like their given names, and after learning some of them, I can understand why (why do people give their children names like that?). I'm proud of my given name, and at least it's better than "Hey you" for either way that people choose to spell my nickname.

Charley
 
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My name through my youth was always spelled same as yours.... I only switch to Chuck when my navy buddies all started using Chuck.... or sometimes just Ellis.... I have my dad's initials, so he always said if I use my initials I had to add junior (JR) afterwards.... Rarely ever use full initials, usually just CE.
Dad when by his second name, Reginald or Reg.... a lot of his work mates called him Slim or just CR...
Don't know how people come up with some of the old names...
 
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