A year with De Quervain's tenosynovitis

For about a year now I've had De Quervain's tenosynovitis in my left wrist. It's an irritation of the tendons on the thumb side of the wrist, and mine came from one very specific thing: the way I was holding my daughter while feeding her.

How it started

It started around June 2025, when my third child was about six months old. A month or so earlier I had wanted to start her on solids, but she was still a little too wobbly to sit up straight in our high chair. The straps weren't tight enough to hold her steady at five months.

So I fed her on my lap instead. I'd sit her on my left thigh, support her back with my left forearm, and hold her left leg with my left hand. To do that I had to bend my left wrist at almost a 90-degree angle and hold it there while I fed her with my right hand. Two or three times a day, for a couple of months.

That's what caused it. The bigger problem was that once it started, it never got a chance to heal, because everyday life kept re-aggravating it.

What it felt like

The pain lived right at the base of my thumb and along the thumb side of my wrist. The worst version of it was a snapping sensation that would jolt up my wrist, somewhere between a 7 and a 10 out of 10. It wasn't a dull ache I could push through. It was sharp and sudden, and it showed up during the most ordinary movements.

When it first started, the triggers were small things: putting on a backpack, taking my phone in and out of my pocket, getting dressed in the morning. Getting dressed was especially bad. Later on, the thing that aggravated it most was diaper changes and clothing changes for the kids, especially any kind of pinching motion.

Two moments stand out as the most painful.

The first was picking my toddler up out of her car seat. I extended my thumb to slide my hand under her armpit, and something snapped in the tendon. It was a 10 out of 10. I had to sit down for ten minutes, that's how bad it was, the kind of pain I'd compare to breaking a bone. The spot where my thumb connects to my wrist was swollen for a week afterward. Part of it is still a little swollen now.

The second was a morning when I woke up in so much pain that I went to urgent care. I was hoping they could give me a steroid injection, because my actual appointment for one kept getting pushed back. They said they couldn't, that I needed an orthopedic specialist for that. Instead they gave me a Toradol injection in my hip and a different brace. The Toradol helped for a couple of days, but it didn't do anything for the actual recovery.

Basketball, surprisingly, barely aggravated it. I'm right-handed and not a heavy ball handler, so getting whacked on the left wrist didn't happen often. The real damage came from extending my thumb while my wrist was bent, which is exactly the motion you make all day as a parent.

Getting diagnosed

I knew almost immediately what it was. I did the Finkelstein test on myself, tucking my thumb into my fist and bending my wrist toward my pinky, and it was obviously, intensely painful. I went to an orthopedist and got the diagnosis confirmed.

Honestly, the medical system kind of let me down on the timing. I knew what the problem was and what I needed, but it still took weeks to get the steroid injection scheduled, between people being out sick and slow scheduling. The delay is something I still think about, because I'm fairly sure it let the problem get worse than it needed to.

The injury you can't rest

Here's the part that made this so different from any other injury I've had. Everyone in my life kept telling me to rest it. And I just couldn't.

When you have three kids, there is an endless list of small manual tasks that fill the entire day. Emptying the dishwasher. Diaper changes. Swapping kids in and out of clothes. Picking them up, putting them down. None of it is optional, and almost all of it goes straight through the exact tendon I was trying to protect. The people around me helped as much as they could, but there was never a stretch where I could actually set my hand down and leave it alone.

That's different from my ulnar nerve surgery a few years ago, where I could take two months off and let my arm heal. This time the thing that hurt me was also the thing I had to keep doing every single day. The standard advice assumes you can stop. I couldn't.

The brace didn't help me

The most common advice you'll read for De Quervain's is to wear a thumb spica brace. For me, I don't think it helped at all. I actually think it made things worse.

I tried a couple of different braces. They made my hand go numb and forced my whole hand into an awkward, contorted shape for hours at a time. And because I still had to do housework and take care of the kids, I'd end up doing all of that with the brace on, working a hand that couldn't bend the way it needed to. So I wasn't really resting it. I was straining it in a fixed position instead.

At my worst, when I was so stiff and scared to move my thumb that I just wouldn't move it at all, I found something I liked better than the brace: athletic tape. For a couple of weeks I taped my thumb to my index finger so the thumb couldn't move, while the rest of my hand still moved normally. That was more bearable than the brace, since at least the rest of my hand could still move normally.

Maybe my braces just didn't fit right. But I'd be careful about treating the brace as the obvious fix.

What actually turned it around

A few things finally started to help.

I got a first steroid injection, and it did nothing for me. Maybe they missed the tendon sheath. I don't know. I got a second one after the car-seat incident, when I went back to my doctor and basically said I need to do something here, I'm considering surgery.

Then a family member who was dealing with the exact same thing pushed me, hard, to stop thinking about surgery and take physical therapy seriously. That's what actually changed things for me.

The exercises were simple:

• Resisted thumb raises. I'd loop a rubber band around my thumb and the tip of my pinky, and do controlled thumb raises against it. I started keeping a few rubber bands around the house and in my pocket so I could do them throughout the day.
• Controlled wrist circles. Basically the exact motion that caused the sharp pain, but done slowly and deliberately, working my range of motion back up a little at a time.

I had been so afraid to move my thumb that I'd kept it completely still, which only made it stiffer. Gradually loading and moving it was what helped. About three weeks after the second injection, which my doctor said was around when it would kick in, and a month after I started taking the exercises seriously, the pain dropped by about half.

I never actually saw a physical therapist. The exercises came from my doctor and from the family member who'd been through it and wouldn't let me give up.

Where I am now

It's June 2026, so I've been living with this for about a year. The pain is down roughly 50% from the worst of it. Certain motions still set it off, and it can still get very painful. But I ditched the brace months ago and haven't worn it since, and I'm now pretty confident I'm not going to need surgery.

A big part of what kept me doing the exercises was not wanting to lose basketball. I play full-court ball several times a week, and surgery would have meant being out for something like eight weeks to three months. I really didn't want that. If that car-seat level of pain had happened a second time, though, I think I would have scheduled the surgery on the spot.

If you're dealing with this

A few things I'd pass along:

• If you think you have this, push to get the steroid injection sooner rather than later. The delay in getting mine is the part I'd do differently.
• Don't assume the brace is the fix. It's the standard recommendation, but it didn't work for me and may have made things worse. If you literally cannot rest the hand, a brace you fight against all day isn't the same as rest.
• Take the rehab exercises seriously, earlier than you think you need to. Gently moving and loading the tendon helped me far more than locking it down did.
• Avoiding surgery seems like a good goal to have, and it helped motivate me to do what I could to improve my chances of recovery.