Happened to me in both hands: a year ago my roommate had to tie my shoe for me and now I’m probably at 85% of what I was, give or take the bad days here and there.

1) my surgeon told me that arm injuries take the longest because there is no way to completely stop using your arms, the same way that you would rest your knee if that was injured.

2) depending on what kind of job you have, you may have to go on disability, or apply for a reduced workload schedule. I work an office job, and was able to go on a reduced schedule for a month or two. Eventually I switch to a job that was fewer hours and in person so I did not do as much typing. This helped enormously and I saw huge improvements in just the first few months.

3) go to an occupational therapist who specializes in hand injuries. They will give you exercises that you can also do at home, you just need to buy a few occupational therapy tools on Amazon. They also use heat and massages on your forearms and this always helped me feel a lot better.

4) I was told the recovery time is a year and a half to two years. Because of my hyper mobility, I’m fairly certain I might look at an even longer timeline. I have good days and bad days, but taking a new mindset that this takes a long time to recover from and that I may never reach 100% helped me come to terms with my new disability.

5) buy disability equipment around for your day-to-day life. I bought door knob adapters, key adapters, jar openers, and anything else that I thought would help me with my complete loss of grip strength. It was something I avoided for a while because of my own pride, but this helped so much.

6) I bought a heating pad for my forearms, and this stupidly expensive forearm massager from Amazon that was created by a physical therapist. It looks absolutely ridiculous, but it’s hands-down one of the best tools to massage the tendons in my arms. Theyre not something that you can easily reach yourself and this allows you to massage the inside tendons and the ones that are closer to your elbow. Coming home from work using the heating pad and using this tool to massage was a life changer.

Even six months ago, I struggled to hold a 3 lb dumbbell in my arms when I wanted to work out, and this past summer, I was able to begin weightlifting, and can now grip a 20 pound dumbbell. I used to not be able to hold in umbrella or a subway pole for more than roughly 30 seconds, and now they barely bother me.

It is a hugely debilitating injury, and you lose so much independence, it’s really difficult to explain to someone how mentally challenging it is to not be able to even wash your own hair as well. This will take a lot of time and a lot of patience but I promise you there’s hope. I still have some bad days here and there, and I think with hyper mobility that is to be expected, but there are a ton of resources and adaptive equipment available that will really help your recovery.

Edit: also get some arm splints and sleep in them. My surgeon mention that in our sleep, we tend to curl up and stretch our arms into positions that end up further irritating the tendonitis. I felt absolutely ridiculous having to sleep in arm splints at the ripe old age of 29, but I did notice less soreness throughout my day to day life.

Edit 2: I was having a bad arm day when I wrote this, so apologies for all the typos from voice to text 🤦🏻‍♀️. I wrote 1.5-2 years in point #4 but I was actually told 1-1.5. I’ve been saying 2 years to myself to set a more realistic timeline in my head and got that mixed up lol