Parents Ganglion cyst surgery?

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Dd has one. We have been to the dr several times to have it looked at. He advised her to use tiger paws. They work wonders. No more pain. We ignore it. Book thing hurts. Surgery is no promise of non return. Dr. told us to wait it out. They could drain it but once it was explained to her , she opted out of it. Good luck.
 
Update: It was determined (after I begged the sports medicine doc to actually TALK to the hand surgeon) that she has dorsal scapholunate instability. Which basically means her wrist bones slide out of place almost to the point of dislocating. She was born this way and it is not from gymnastics.

They don't see her level of instability very often and the sports medicine doc, at a very large teaching hospital, has seen it once in a high school rower. The sports med doc told us that she will have problems doing almost any sport because her wrist will not stop dislocating on its own and she encouraged us to go for a surgical procedure where the small nerve that feeds signals to the wrist joint capsule is removed (called a denervation) arthroscopically to stop the chronic pain she feels when she puts any weight on her wrist at all. Prior to doing the SX she had to have an in office diagnostic to confirm that this was the problem by injecting one of the nerves that sends signals to her wrist joint capsule with an anesthetic. The had her do push ups and for the first time in 2 years she was pain free.

The pediatric hand surgeon agreed to do the surgery and told me that he had never performed it on a child so young because they just don't see this problem in children. The reason I agreed to the procedure is that the alternative would be to pull her out of gymnastics and not let her do any other sport except something like soccer where you don't use your upper extremities too much (which she would NEVER do), OR ballet (which she has agreed would be a good option for her). There are no real risks with doing the procedure, they didn't even do it with general anesthesia and the only real risk is that her nerve could regenerate because she is child. If that were to happen the only fix would be to wait until she is older and have the procedure again.

During the procedure the surgeon additionally found synovitis in her joint capsule and cleaned that out. He found nothing wrong with her tendons, ligaments or cartilage and he removed the nerve that sends pain signals to her brain from her joint capsule.

I am going to follow up with her sports med doc in a couple of weeks to determine our next steps. I think synovitis can cause long term damage to a joint (I could be wrong) and need the doctors to educate me on this to figure out where we go from here.

The recovery was simple, not a lot of pain but some discomfort. No external stitches, 4 incisions that are about 1/8". They gave her a BREG Polarcare 300 (everyone must own one of these - they are amazing) to provide 24 hour cold therapy (I never had to deal with a leaky ice pack).

Prior to surgery I told her that this is our last chance to solve this problem and if it is determined after surgery that she should not compete for any reason (the surgery didn't work, they found something else wrong etc.) she has to find another sport. She has had some time to think about it and finally I think she is at peace and if she needs to retire - she can move on to something else like dance, which she absolutely adores. So we will see what happens now that we are closer than we have ever been to resolving this situation.
 
Oh My Gosh!!! Well... DEFINITELY a bit more complex than a ganlion cyst, eh??

I'm glad the surgery and recovery went well. She's so young that finding another sport would probably be MY personal choice for her! Dance is a wonderful seque from gymnastics and as you said, doesn't create all that stress on her hands and wrist. Keep us posted on how her recovery continues!
 
Good for you in pushing the docs to talk to each other!!! Synovitis is an indication of some inflamation. You hate to have your child be that "interesting medical case", but here you got answers and treatment.
 

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