No feeling in middle finger
I had Carpal Tunnel release surgery 13 hours ago, as the anesthetic has worn off the feeling in my middle finger is completely gone and the fingers on either side have seriously reduced feeling. The middle finger is also difficult to fully straighten out.
To be perfectly clear these symptoms were not as severe and mostly bothered me in the early morning hours but sometimes did not occur at all. By getting out of bed and starting my day they would subside within minutes. The symptoms were also sporadic and did not occur every night, similarly they would occur while driving and some other activities again only sporadically. I do believe it was related to the amount of stress put on my hands while working, I am in the construction businesses and am mostly hands on.
Problems with this and tennis elbow lead me to an EMG test which indicated severe CTS in both hands. I first went to my general practitioner over ten years ago and was advised to use a brace. The symptoms of the CTS have gotten progressively worse but never what i am feeling since the surgery.
The surgeon is a reputable Dr. and i personally know of two other people who have had good results.
While i expected the possibility of no improvement i certainly did not expect this type of worsening.
i may have a copy, i will get if not. I will also play it out follow up is Monday. Today does show very slight improvement. Thank you!
As usual when I reply on here my first question is what did the nerve conduction studies show before surgery and how long before surgery were they done. People bandy about words like 'severe' with no consistency and what is described as severe in one lab may be called mild in another or not commented on at all by those people like Lawrence Robinson who believe we should not use terms indicating severity at all. As you will see frm the rest of this site I long ago decided I was going to be explicit and consistent in describing how bad a set of neurophysiological tests for CTS are so if a lab uses either my grading scale or the very similar Italian one then at least we know roughly what the results looked like - but it is hard for the patient to know whether a lab uses one of these severity scales.
Having said that. I would not get too worried about the middle finger quite as early as 13 hours post-op. The longer it persists the more significant it is though and if there was severe loss of sensation after 7 days I would be concerned, especially if it involved all modalities of sensation so that you cannot feel pressure, pin-prick, heat etc. Can you get hold of the actual nerve conduction results?JB