4 weeks in a cast while the bone sets. No screws or plates. Cast comes off at the end of August.

But I gained another tidbit of insight.

If you’ve played any gigs with me, or taken an in-person lesson with me…folks notice I tend to pause every so often and do a specific type of stretch to relieve my thumb. It’s almost a habit…like I’m stretching to relax my muscles and hands.

So yesterday, the doctor is looking at my x-ray. It’s now eight days since the bone break sent me to Patient First, six days after I should have come in for a follow-up because of the storm. I’m becoming a little scared the delay has caused some damage.

He turns from the x-ray. “You’re a tough lady.”

First off, there was a very, very, very slight movement of the bone from the original position… but it honestly was so slight it wasn’t worth doing any surgery over. Tears of relief started to well up; I had been in increasing amounts of pain in the 3 days prior to my appointment. I was very afraid I was in for screws and surgery.

Then he also observes that the cartilage at the base of my left thumb has been completely worn away from the years of use while playing bass. The pain I thought was arthritis starting was really feeling the bone-on-bone contact at times.

That pain had taught me over a decade prior how to relax my left-hand grip; I had been using that as a feedback mechanism to teach my hand to play without unnecessary pressure.

Wild stuff. No idea how long it’s been like that, other than my memory acknowledging it’s been there for a very long time and it was serving as a tool to monitor my grip pressure.

If you want something bad enough….

…but seriously I’m not endorsing that path…no one wants to deal with chronic pain.

One of my friends came to pick me up for my appointment. I told him what they found out.

When he dropped me off, he sat on my couch and started working on his phone. He looks at me and asks me to call him….he wanted to test something.

I found out he decided to assign my incoming calls to the Tina Guo Wonder Woman theme.