Today I thought I would write a post with reflections about living one-handed. It has been two and a half weeks since my surgery and I've got another week and a half to go before I meet with the surgeon again. My instructions up until that time are to avoid any "weight-bearing activity".
My hand is sore but not really painful -- more of a nuisance then a big problem. But if I try to do anything at all with it it sends me very definite messages to stop immediately! So I'm really okay but for the time being I can't use my left hand at all.
My first observation is that being one-handed is a real pain in the neck! There are lot of things that I would like to do or need to do that I'm unable to do, or that I can't do without help. And that's frustrating. There other things that I can still do but which take much longer than they normally would, and sometimes doing one of those things for very long makes my right arm or hand sore and I have to stop and rest it. The last thing I want to do is to get a repetitive strain injury on the right side so that I can't use either hand!!! It is often hard not to be grumpy, as my husband and son can verify :)
But I should follow by saying that I have a lot to be thankful for as well. My surgery was on my left hand and I am right-handed. There are many things I can do easily with my right hand that I can't do it all with my left hand: writing, using scissors, etc. Plus there many others that I'd normally do with both hands that can manage with my right hand alone even though it's slower and more awkward -- like getting dressed or making a sandwich.
Another thing that I had not thought about ahead of time is that losing the use of a hand is not as serious as losing the use of a whole arm. There are lots of things you can do with an arm even when the attached hand is not useful: moving inside doors around, holding things down while your right hand does something with them, shoving stuff with your elbow, leaning on something to keep your balance, etc.
And really if I had to make a choice I would rather have a hand out of commission that a foot. It would be awful to need help just to get from one place to another. Right now I'm very grateful to be able to take walks around the neighborhood because it clears my mind and distracts me from irritation with my hand. I'm happy that moving around inside the house is not an issue at all. I don't have to ask for help every time I want to get to a different room or move across the room. I don't need help going to the bathroom or showering -- those are really important!. When I need help from a family member or just want to talk to them it's easy to find them and get to where they can hear me.
So I'm doing my best to be a Pollyanna about how things could be a lot worse and it's certainly true. However, not being able to use a hand, even my left hand, is an incredible nuisance. My job is done almost totally at a keyboard and even though it's summer right now I have quite a bit of course planning and email communication to be done before September. And yes, it's quite possible to type with just one hand but it's much slower than two-handed touch typing and I make a lot more mistakes and my right shoulder gets tired so I have to take a lot of breaks. I haven't invested in dictation software for my computer because it's expensive and not a lot of help with computer code and technical terms. However, I have a nice free dictation tool on my phone and I'm composing a lot of this blog post with that. As my husband pointed out, this is pretty "meta": dictating about dictating!
When I'm not typing two of my favorite things to do are playing the piano and knitting. The piano is obviously completely out and even after I regain some use of my hand it may be a long time before I get back to where I was. The best way I have found to cope with that is to be diligent about reminding myself that I can move all my fingers in spite of being warned about that thumb tendon. I do expect to get back to the point where I can play the piano and organ at church again and my dream of working as an accompanist after I retire from my teaching job is still quite possible.
Knitting will probably come back sooner but it still may be a while. Knitting is something that makes a great difference to my mental state; whenever I'm nervous or unhappy or worried sitting down and knitting helps a whole lot. We often spend time after dinner in front of the TV and I've always got a knitting project handy to go with that. I've discovered lately that I have lost my ability to sit quietly with my hands folded and just watch something. A couple of crabby days after my surgery David very kindly drove me to Michaels so that I could buy a knitting loom - probably just as important to his sanity at that point as to mine! It took me a little while to figure out how to use it and originally I needed to weigh the thing down on my lap with my left arm as I knitted with my right hand but I have progressed to the point where I don't need my right arm at all. I'm still sticking with very simple stuff and it's not as creative as some of the fancy kinds of knitting that I like to do, but it feeds that part of me that likes the feel of the yarn and needs to be making something. By the time my hand recovers I'm going to have a big pile of nice warm hats for charity. That's a good feeling to have something productive come out of this time when there are so many things I can't do. Here is a picture of the almost-5 hats I have made so far since the surgery:
No comments:
Post a Comment