In Which I Go To The Doctor

So today I spent the morning at the doctor's office, because I might have sort of broken my hand a tiny little bit.

It's weird being at the doctor's office when I'm not there for Connor, by the way.  They made me wait for ten whole minutes-- it was crazy!  I'm used to just sort of waltzing in past everybody and being whisked into a room.  Guess I'm a little spoiled.

But back to the hand thing.  Anyway, so a few weeks ago I was (of course) playing roller derby and I partially broke a fall with the outside portion of my left hand.  We wear wrist guards and it didn't swell up or anything, so it didn't seem like a very big deal.  My pinky and the top of my palm bruised, but since there's a whole lot of blood flow to extremities the bruising cleared up pretty quickly. 

So there's no more bruising, no more swelling, and the pinky works just fine.  Except now whenever I fully extend my hand and put pressure on the palm (like if I'm doing a pushup) an area just under my pinky hurts like a son of a gun.  Oh, and also I have a hard, pointy lump there that seems to be attached to the bone.  It's about the size of a pea, and it moves with my pinky joint.  You can feel it really easily under the skin.

So I went in to the doctor's office today, and the doctor said it's probably one of two things.  Either it's a bone spur, in which case I probably won't do anything about it as it's not really affecting the functionality of my hand that badly, or I've got a chipped bone in there.  Specifically what they call an avulsion fracture, where the bone broke and then a tendon pulled the end of the bone off. 

Glorious.

My guess is that it's probably going to end up being a bone spur.  I mean, I can't help but think that if it were actually broken I would have experienced at least a little bit of swelling and probably a heck of a lot more discomfort.  But the main reason I'm hoping it's a bone spur is because if it's a chipped bone the doctor said they're probably going to want to do something to it right away, and then I'd have to figure out a reason to put them off until after championships. 

I know, I know-- I shouldn't try and justify this sort of thing, I'm being irresponsible with my health, blah blah blah.  But it's championships, dang it, and it's not like the darn thing is going to get any worse, right?  It's already been almost a month since I injured it in the first place which means that it's probably pretty much healed that way if it has been fractured, so I imagine it could probably wait a couple more weeks. 

But there's no use going into that until the x-ray results come back (which should be some time in the next week) so in the meantime I'm just going to keep skating, and I'll hope for the best!

~Jess