Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Reading Gave me Tendinitis

It's true! Sad... but still true.
So here's the story:
Back in April of 2009 I woke up one Friday morning with a shooting pain in my right wrist and my thumb seemingly trying to pop out of its joint. Completely out of the blue this happened. Looking back at it now I remember I did have some funny pain in my wrist while I was sleeping (I shove my hand under my head and I would wake up to pain in that wrist, then readjust and be fine,) for a week or two leading up to it, but really nothing that led me to think I might be on my way to incapacitation.
And that's what it was, really. I couldn't do anything with that hand- brush my teeth, dress myself, NOTHING without extreme pain. It was bizarre. I told my mother about it later that morning and she nodded and said, "Oh, sorry about that. You've got tendinitis." Apparently she has it, too.
So I looked back at what I'd been up to that week to try to determine the cause. The previous couple of days I had been helping my mom pack and load her truck for a move, but I'd moved 5 times in the previous 7 years and never had a problem...
I had spent that month painting and cleaning and rearranging the house in anticipation of our first annual Derby party, but really I'd been doing that since we'd moved in almost a year before!
Not coming up with an obvious answer I gave up, slapped a wrist brace on, called my Doc to make an appt., and reported for more packing duty at Mom's. (one handed, mind you, I'm a very dutiful daughter!)
That night as I exhaustedly collapsed into bed and reached for my book, I got another shooting pain. I paused, and looked at my book.


I thought about the way I bent my arm to sort of hang the book off my thumb while I read on my side... could my book be giving me tendinitis? It was a hefty tome: 928 pages weighing in at 2.8 lbs. That's a bit of weight to hook onto your thumb for two hours a day. But really- a reading injury? It seemed unlikely (not to mention pathetic!)
I mentioned the theory to my Dr. when I went in a few days later. She thought it unlikely as well and preferred to think I had done something to it while moving furniture. Or painting. Or tennis. But a book? Probably not...
So time passed, therapy made the pain go away, (I took the precaution of finishing that book sitting up in bed,) putty helped build the muscle up and I was back to tennis within a few months. Good!

Then... about three weeks ago it started acting up again. I could think of no reason why! I wasn't painting, I hadn't rearranged furniture in days, nothing unusual at all had happened! But that night as I reached for my book, which I was very close to finishing, I paused...

Hmm... 784 pages, 2.2 lbs... could it be? Was my doctor wrong? Am I that pathetic?
Well yes, I turns out I am. I finished reading that book two days later, and within 48 hours of that my tendinitis pain was gone.
Seriously!
I had a reading injury! I was so angry! Not so much because I was pathetic, but because I DIDN'T even like Sacred Games that much! If the first injury had occurred while reading the Wheel of Time tome, I might wear my injury with some pride. That's a book worth getting injured for! But a book you wouldn't recommend to a friend? Oh man...

No comments: