I haven't given up on the Biblical Definition of Marriage series, nor am I pulling back from this blog again. But in the world of me there's always something, and this time the something is tendonitis. In both wrists.
My doctor's advice was for me to take two wrist braces and call him in the morning. Or rather, wear two wrist braces all day every day, not lift anything heavy, don't stress my wrists at all, and call him in a few weeks with an update. Well, I've been doing this for a week now, so when his nurse called me today with the results of the x-rays I had last week (hence the diagnosis of the aforementioned tendonitis, which had previously been suspected and has now apparently been confirmed by the lack of arthritis in the x-rays--good news there, I guess), I told her I wanted to give an update now. It's not working. I told her I want to move forward with physical therapy or something, and get this fixed. I need my wrists back.
See, my primary job is Mama. And Mamas don't get sick days. We can't use a note from our doctors to demand reasonable accommodations be made for us on the job. Our kids don't care. My daughter is two years old, thirty-five pounds, and still in diapers. I can't exactly tell her that she has to stay in her poopy diaper because I'm not supposed to pick her up or do the wrist-twisting necessary to change her. My husband's been great about taking care of that for me when he's home, but he's the one bringing in a paycheck, and that frequently requires him to do these obnoxiously inconvenient things like leaving the house and actually going to his job in order to keep doing that.
So I've gotten in the habit of checking all the bottles of juice and jars of peanut butter and jelly I'm going to have to use while he's at work, and giving them to him to break the seal for me before he leaves the house if they've never been opened. But my bottles of Perrier that I drink during the day? I'm on my own.
And then there's typing. I traded in my mouse for a trackball and switched the buttons so I'm pushing down with my ring finger more than stretching my thumb, and got those annoying gel rests for in front of my keyboard and mouse, but it still really sucks to type while wearing two wrist braces. I can barely do it at all with the good braces I bought last week. Five minutes and I'm done, in pain, and my entire upper body is fatigued for hours. I'm able to do better with the cheap braces I got a few years ago when I was pregnant with Spencer and had some wrist pain. But I'm sure that the reason I can type better with those is because they're not giving me as much support, which probably means I'm aggravating my tendonitis with every keystroke.
But I'm trying to be a writer, and writers have to write. I'm touched by and grateful to the woman at church on Sunday who offered to transcribe for me, but I can't write by speaking into a tape recorder, and handwriting is no easier on my wrists than typing is. (Oh yes, I'm sure it was quite entertaining for the congregation on Sunday watching me try to preside at communion while wearing my wrist braces. Thank heavens for a helpful worship assistant who spared me from having to pour the wine from the heavy flagon into the chalice!) So I have to be selective about what I type right now, and anything with a deadline has priority. I have new devotions being published daily over at Quiet Publications, so keeping up with that has been my number one priority.
My other priority this week has been a writing contest. My friend Jenn (she blogs at Randomness and Lunacy and Writesy, and earlier this year published her first novel Ripple the Twine) posted a link to the Center for Writing Excellence's August Fiction in Five contest on Facebook a few weeks ago, and I signed up. The way it works is they e-mail a prompt and the guidelines on a given day (this past Monday, to be exact), and the entrants have five days to write a story and send it in. The deadline is this Friday night. So by design the writing has to be done this week. When I signed up, I had no idea typing would be such a chore for me this week. But anyway, that's a hard deadline, so that's been getting a fair amount of my limited typing ability, as well.
And now I've squeezed out a blog post here, and my wrists are killing me. But rest assured that I'll still be here as often as I can. I just need to slow down for a bit.
Like I have time for that!
No comments:
Post a Comment