David Graham

In 2020, I had no use of my left hand and had only extremely limited use of my right hand. To cut a long story short on how this happened, in 2008, I suffered a partial tear in the scapholunate ligament of my right wrist.
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I was supposed to have a full repair job done on the ligament; however, at the last minute, I decided to first have some ganglion cysts removed, which had formed as a result of the tear. The reason being the ligament repair surgery did not have a good success rate.

It turned out to be a good decision as it later transpired that the surgery is not a wise idea. However, what would have been a good idea is understanding the limitations that my injury left me with, as well as understanding exercises and behaviours that would have benefited my wrists, and those that would have severely hindered me.

The fact I didn’t get any of this, and was left with the belief that after my three-year recovery, 98 percent of which I did on my own with no help from medical practitioners, I just had to be mindful of weakness in my wrists, and recurrences.

Recurrences were a common theme, but I kept getting better again.

However, in February 2019, I got what I suspected to be RSI in my right wrist. It was a standard overuse injury brought on most likely through poor ergonomics when using a computer and using a mobile phone too much. A lesson there for others, using a computer and mobile phone may not seem like something that could lead to severe injuries, but in fact, it is a really common way for people to become injured.

Getting back on point, after I discovered that RSI existed and that it could happen in your wrists from overuse of computers and mobile phones et cetera, I first attempted to improve my ergonomic setup. I then attempted to rehab my right wrist.

Nothing was working, and I was now getting trouble in the scapholunate area of my right wrist, and so I went to the doctor in July 2019, and was referred to a specialist, as it was clear at this point that the torn ligament was complicating matters.

This is where things go very wrong. Without going into any great detail, I thought I was being seen by a doctor, but I was actually seen by a physician associate, which is not a doctor.

This person rightly identified that I had a serious problem and needed to be seen by a specialist, but unfortunately, messed up the referral. The irony was, I mentioned briefly at the end, I had issues with my ears at the time, tinnitus, she insisted I could only be seen for one thing at a time, told me she would make the referral to the specialist, wrist, and yet I actually got a referral for my ears.

Confused about this, I called up and asked what was going on and was told that she had written that it was wise I would be seen by a specialist for my ears. Fair play, I wasn’t going to complain. But out of curiosity, I asked whether the referral to the specialist for my wrists had gone through.

What referral, was the response. Apologies were then made, and she told me that there was no need for me to come back in; I could simply call up a service called TIMs, and they would refer me to the specialist for my wrists.

Turned out this was not the correct advice, TIMS is physiotherapy, and I should have been referred to the hospital to be seen by orthopaedics, who would have scanned my right wrist and decided what to do next. Physio or whatever.

But physio was where I ended up to start with, and I was led to believe that the physio I was seen was a specialist in wrist injuries and had access to the history of my wrist problems.

Tonight I was wrong. The physio, whom I suspect had only just recently completed his studies, had no access to my wrist history. I only discovered this afterwards, a long time afterwards, and it took me a lot of effort, but turns out that the hospital has my records, and the physio didn’t have access to them.

That means I was with an inexperienced physio who had no knowledge of just how complex my injury issues were. Needless to say, he completely misdiagnosed me and gave me advice that inevitably led my right wrist to deteriorate substantially.

Not just that, but to rub salt into the wound, his advice led my left wrist to become injured (most likely an overuse injury, brought on by the fact that I was unable to use my right hand at all for a period). When I told him that my right wrist had got worse, and that my left wrist felt strained, he doubled down on his previous advice by telling me to keep doing the same things.

Worst of all, amongst his pieces of advice was that I should continue lifting weights in the gym. He insisted I needed to keep my wrists strong and that weightlifting would be beneficial. I was later told that his advice was tantamount to telling somebody with a fractured knee that doing squats would help heal the injury.

I don’t blame him, I blame the system that allowed me to be seen by him, and it gets worse.

I followed his advice the second time, and while in the gym felt a sharp stabbing pain in my left wrist while doing incline benchpress with dumbbells. I didn’t know this at the time, but I had torn the scapholunate ligament in my left wrist.

At the time though, all I knew was that something had gone very wrong, and I did not want to be seen by the same physio again, so I called up and was seen by a different physio. I tried to explain to him what had happened, but he didn’t seem to get it, as I suspect he read the notes from the previous guy, which were a load of rubbish. I have since read them, and you can tell he was very inexperienced.

In exasperation, and after discovering that he did not have access to my full records, I got them from the doctors and handed them to him. His facial expression on reading the history said everything. Oh dear. Because of this, I was finally referred to the right place.

Except, something went wrong again. This was just unlucky, the specialist was away, and I was seen by his in effect secretary. She took down the history I told her, but made mistakes, and when I was referred for an MRI scan, it was only my right wrist that they scanned.

I remember turning up to the scan and being extremely frustrated. I said what about my left wrist, the something very wrong with it. All they could do was apologise and say we can’t scan it as we have no authority to is it has not been given, and so they scanned my right wrist, but not my left, and so the torn ligament was missed.

Things still kept going wrong after this. When I went for the appointment to get the results of the MRI scan I did get, the specialist was away again. However, this time I was at least seen by a specialist, one of those working under the main specialist.

He seemed to understand that things had gone wrong and decided it was best to refer me to a specialist physio, one who specialised specifically in hands and wrists.

But you guessed it, something went wrong. I have no idea what, but I ended up being seen by a physio, but not the right one. She immediately identified that I was in the wrong place and did her best to give me advice. I took it, called up to find out what was going on and to demand I was seen by the right person, but then, before anything could happen, lockdown came in, and the NHS was in effect closed.

Because of this, I had to wait a further six months until August/September to finally be seen by the right people, the people who I should have been seen by in the first place.

The problem was, by this point, my left wrist, still undiagnosed due to the repeated systematic failings which led me to keep ending up being seen by the wrong people, had deteriorated such that I couldn’t use the hand at all. In fact, the instability was so bad, I couldn’t even walk around the block as the pain in my left wrist was so bad that even walking caused me agony – who knew that a wrist injury could leave you close to housebound.

My right wrist, without an appropriate care plan, had also substantially deteriorated, and at the worst point, I could barely pick food from a plate. The crazy thing is, it was me who put a splint on my left wrist and my right wrist, a big one on my left wrist to make it completely immobile. This turned out to be an important first step in rehabbing it.

When I was finally seen by the correct people, my left wrist was diagnosed as having a torn scapholunate ligament, and I was given appropriate physio. I also studied scapholunate ligament injuries in-depth myself, and my mother, who was a physio herself, did the same, and together we managed to rebuild my wrists, which was not easy.

It took a year to even get back full movement, and to build up the strength to be able to lift even one kilogram dumbbells, then another year before I could drive again, which meant my parents had to drive me even to the gym and come back and collect me. It was a nightmare time. But I got over it, partly because I’m extremely stubborn and refused to give up. The doctors told me I would not get back good use; I managed to prove them wrong. Partly because I had a great support network in my family.

I share this story for three reasons. Number one, to show that you can overcome bad injuries through sheer willpower and a desire to get better; number two, to get better you really do need the right support, no matter who you are; and number three, the NHS is broken, not because it does not have good doctors and nurses, but because it has a system that fails those doctors and nurses, and by default, fails its patients.

In terms of what is wrong with the system, it is completely disjointed, nothing talks to each other, and when something goes wrong, it is virtually impossible to correct it because of how disjointed and disconnected it is.

In the future, I intend to try to fight to change this. But for now, I simply wish to share this story and to say that I’m going to share all the methods I used to get my wrist better, so if anybody out there has the same issue, maybe they will find what I did of benefit.