So, the hands.

It turns out that I have a lot to learn about "Blogger."  I assumed that I could copy and paste text and images from other sources (like my composition in Word, like my images in iPhoto) I still haven't learned out to use Photo.  That's why some of my posts have been virtually invisible. All evidence to the contrary, I'm not that fond of change and am learning slowly.  And what has this to do with "the hands"? 

Well typing, while getting a little better, a little easier, after surgery number one, is still cumbersome. The middle finger on my left hand still does what it wants to do without communicating with my brain, so it can miss letters altogether--especially d, c, and e--or it replaces one for another as it {fliws over the keyboard, if I'm not looking, and i van gwt somrthing like this.}  But handwriting is even worse, more painful, and doesn't solve the web log problem anyway.

So right now I'll write about my hands as they float through the medical world.  Or don't.  The surgery two weeks ago today was guardedly successful.  It turns out that the surgeon's caution was appropriate and that the damage to my median nerves were of a much older etiology than I'd first thought.  After carefully going over my medical history, it seems possible that I originally injured both hands during the California AIDS Rides, "Lifecycle," in 2008 and 2009. I didn't adequately prepare either year.  I figured I'd just get on the seat and pedal.  And I did.  I completed the 565 or so miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles both years.  But my hands got numb.  (My butt got numb, too, and I shudder, literally and figuratively, what that has in store for me.)  And apparently it's the vibration as the pressure that injures the nerve. They've mildly tingled off and on ever since, but the rheumatologist and surgeon believe that injury was just under the radar and then holding my hands in the unfamiliar positions driving on the left side of the road in the right side of the car for fairly long periods of time in England may well have pushed me--them--over some edge, or threshold.

My left hand, which had been noticeably worse than my right, is now marginally better than my right hand two weeks after surgery.  They told me I wouldn't be sure of the results until after a month.  So that's a good sign.  Much of the day (except when I'm typing) I leave the incision un-bandaged, so it can dry and callous, and leave the braces off (unless I'm typing or driving or sleeping).

The surgeon is a self-described "sanitary nut" (I envisioned a cashew in a jar of bleach.),  and insists that I keep my hand out of water--the pool, the ocean, dish-water; showers are OK--for a month after the surgery.  By which time I'll have the second "Carpal Tunnel Release" surgery (on 16 November) and have to wait another month before I can swim.  What I've been doing is reading by the pool and whenever it gets too warm, or I want to talk to someone swimming, I get in shallower than the 4' middle section of then pool and wade with my arm raised. Day after day I have to assure people that, no, I'm not waving at them, until they see the bandage, and I'm not as creepily friendly as I appear. I'm really not.  I've also been walking, further and faster, every pretty much ever day since the day of the surgery. So though I'm kind of vegetating, I'm not merely vegetating like a slug.

I'm occasionally taking hydrocodone in the evening which does reduce the pain in my hands, lets me relax and sleep.  I refuse to feel guilty about this, even with the parents on Sixty Minutes last night saying that people should put up with pain and not take these "gateway drugs" to heroin.  I'll let you know if I become a junky.  (I really will.) But it's looking unlikely.

If this below is TMI, avert your eyes.