Newly diagnosed
Hi
My GP has diagnosed CTS in my left hand. It all started very quickly. I woke up one morning about 2 months ago with really strong and painful pins and needles in both hands. All of my fingers were extremely swollen and I could hardly move them. As it was a Sunday and I was extremely worried I visited the local hospital and the Doctor who saw me thought I could have rhumetoid arthritis (not sure if that's the proper spelling). He gave me strong pain killers and tablets to take the swelling down. He also advised me to see my GP which I did the following day. By this time the swelling and pain in my right hand had disappeared but my left hand was still hurting. My GP was amazing, with a few taps and stretching my hand backwards she suspected carpol tunnel syndrome and left me to decide whether to wait and see if it disappeared. If not she said I could consider steroid injections or surgery. Two months have now gone by and the paid in my left hand is getting worse, especially at night. During the day it's pins and needles and numbness rather than extreme pain. The other symptons I now have is pain travelling from my wrist up my left arm, pain in my left shoulder and neck. I just thought it a good idea to put these details in writing for future reference and also I wonder if anyone else has experienced the arm, neck and shoulder pain.
It does seem that some patients with CTS experience pain all the way up the arm to the neck - or at least they have pain like that which goes away when the CTS is treated so one assumes that it was coming from the wrist. In your case the current symptoms sound quite likely to be CTS but the story of the onset is odd - CTS does not generally cause visible swelling of the fingers and it sounds as if you have had some acute event in the hands which produced the original pain and swelling and that that has perhaps triggered a secondary CTS. JB