This injury slowly seemed to be getting better. The intense pain from the beginning went down after a couple of weeks or so. I had acupuncture several times which helped greatly. The bruising did not seem to be going away. My acupuncturist was a little concerned.
Over the winter I tried swimming several times, thinking that I was on the mend. I would mostly kick and got up to swimming 100 m freestyle at a time. My arm felt very sore when swimming and I could not do backstroke, it was too painful. I stopped playing violin.
I stopped trying to swim early in 2013 and got back into running which did not bother me too much at this time. I didn't run more than 3 miles.
In March I started preparing to move across the country with my family and that involved lifting some boxes. My arm got aggravated by this and I went back to acupuncture. At this point he told me to go to my doctor to get an ultrasound because the fact that the bruising was still present concerned him. He suspected a blood flow problem of some sort. I did get acupuncture and it helped, but not as much as it did right after the initial injury.
I went to my doctor and he wanted to put me in physical therapy. I told him that my acupuncturist had recommended an ultrasound and he agreed to it. The ultrasound indicated that I had a chronic blood clot or chronic thrombosis. This basically means that I had an acute blood clot in the past but my body resolved it. I have some scarring in my vein from that. This ultrasound indicated that it was in the cephalic vein which is a superficial vein and not too scary. The prognosis was to go to a vascular surgeon.
The timing was bad because I was getting ready to move so I had to find a vascular doctor in Houston.
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