devolution

well, i went to A+E.

no panic attack, aided by keli's accompaniment and some cool messages from ma homies which gave me a shot of courage. and no x-ray either. instead a pair of doctors prodded and poked my hand while trying to work out what was causing me so much pain today. they hummed and hawed, i cursed. loudly.
nothing broken. but it turns out i damaged tendons in my hand on my return journey from toronto in a luggage related incident (that'll stop me from returning home with twice my body weight in future, eh?) said tendons are connected to my thumb's oposable movement. hence i move my thumb and i feel pain in my wrist. unenthusiastic about injecting my hand with steroids (breaks the pain cycle but doesn't actually heal the tendon and by killing the pain might encourage me to go on using my thumb) they dispatched me with a makeshift splint to stop me moving my thumb for the next week so it can recover from today's agonising 'flare up' and then a month of minimal thumb movement and no load bearing of any sort with my right hand. as for the chronic, ie underlying, symptoms of last 8 weeks - only time will tell but the prognosis was, 'tendons are buggers to heal' and i could be putting up with a dodgy thumb/wrist combination for a while. i'm booked in to the hand clinic in 4 weeks and if things haven't improved we may resort to an injection. i get the distinct impression that tendons, whilst a stunning piece of biological engineering, have proven elusive to medical treatment. the docs were clearly fascinated at the complexity of how one's hand works as a peice of machinery but sorry that there is so little to be done to solve the problem. physiotherapy is pointless it seems. a moving tendon is not a healing one.
so, armed with a lot more knowledge of how my hand works, instructions to self medicate if needed and basically put up with the dis-ability as best i can and try not to let it get me down, however frustrating, my right hand is now a live experiment in what our species was like before we got opposable thumbs in the great journey of evolution. yay. :0|

i am thankfully left handed but in this right handed world, like most left handers, i do a load of stuff with my right. this is gonna be a frustrating few weeks and will be a lenten test of patience, but at least i can write.

that said, still proud to be a southpaw...

drama over for now.

LB,x