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Archive for August 2nd, 2022

Diary #631

Posted in Diary, tagged , on August 2, 2022| 7 Comments »

I suppose I should’ve recognized that sooner or later, I’d start to show symptoms of age beyond mere grey hairs and facial lines that can be hidden by modern technology.  And I should’ve also recognized that by the time she was my age, Maman had already been suffering from arthritis for years, and my mother had surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome before she turned 50.  So it really wasn’t a surprise that I developed one of them (I suspect it’s arthritis, because it’s in both hands even though I’m a one-finger typist), but what was a surprise was how rapid the onset was.  Before the summer started, I’d never had any persistent symptoms (though now I’m wondering about the occasional spasms I’ve had in my right hand for years), but a little over a month ago my hand started hurting too much to ignore, so last week I bought one of these braces and it’s definitely helping.  In fact, no sooner did I start wearing this on my right hand while working, than my left hand started hurting just as badly.  It seems a reasonable assumption that my left hand was probably hurting before and I simply didn’t notice it because the pain in my right hand was much worse; with the brace alleviating the right-hand pain, I was able to notice that in the left.  And that makes me wonder if perhaps I’ve actually had this problem for some time, and what changed recently was that the pain finally reached a level I couldn’t ignore.  I have a very high threshhold of pain, and now I’m beginning to wonder how much of that is due to the way I’m wired, and how much due to a stubborn refusal to let pain distract me from whatever it is I want to do.

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