Legends of the Sun Pig

While I was dropping Alex and Fiona off at nursery today, I felt (and heard) something in my wrist go pop as I lifted Fiona out of her car seat. Since then, almost every movement of my wrist hurts a lot, and I can’t exert any kind of force (pushing, pulling, gripping) with my right hand without experiencing a great deal of sharp, stabbing pain.

Curiously enough, I can still type. I think this is because my typing posture is pretty good, and I keep my wrists straight while I’m tapping away at the keys. I still think it might be time for a natural keyboard. The only problem with that is that they’re wider and taller than normal keyboards, and I’m not sure if one would fit in the sliding tray under my desk, and still leave me enough room for my mouse. Maybe it’s time for a trackball. (Takes up less room than a travelling mouse.) Might be time to brush up on my Windows keyboard shortcuts, too.

I actually went to see my doctor for the less severe version of this problem last week. Now that it’s taken a jump for the worse, I think I’m going to have to go back again…

It struck me the other day that reality TV shows are another example of an industry shedding skilled employees, only to replace them with lower-paid temporary workers. Out go the professional actors and presenters, and in come the shallow attention-seekers and Z-list celebrities eager to flaunt their lack of talent in order to (re)gain their 15 minutes of fame, or whatever dubious prize is on offer.

Modern life is rubbish.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had a nagging pain in my right shoulder. Not a blind, stabbing pain, but just a throb and a twinge. It throbs at the end of a long day, and it twinges if I try to reach too far in any direction. Last month, as we were weeding out our book collection (which involved much heavy lifting of boxes up to and down from the attic), I noticed that my right wrist was hurting, too.

Until then, I’d put the pain down to the fact that with two kids around now, I’m doing even more heavy lifting in my day-to-day life than I was before. Fiona is still growing exponentially, it seems, and Alex still likes to be carried around a lot. But with the wrist staring to play up, my thoughts turned more towards some kind of repetitive strain injury. As a programmer, this is a bit of a scary thing to consider, because I earn my living from sitting at a desk and typing all day. My wrists are my livelihood.

So I’ve taken some steps to mitigate the problem. At home, I used to use a regular dining room-style table and chair for computer work. No more. I’ve now got a nice new desk and a proper adjustable chair to go with it. It took me a week or so to get used to the new sitting and typing arrangement, but I’m much happier with it now. Also, the new desk gives me more space to accumulate desk clutter. Excellent.

At work, I’ve switched mouse hands. I tried this a couple of years ago on a tip-off that it would help my drumming by improving the fine motor control in my left hand. I gave up on it quickly back then, but I’ve stuck with it now. I’ve been switched over for a fortnight now, and I can definitely feel the difference at the end of a day. My wrist and shoulder don’t suffer nearly as much.

Another unexpected benefit from using my left hand for mousing is that my right hand is now free for doing other things, like scribbling down notes. This has been terribly useful over the last week or so, when most of my work has consisted of scrolling through vast screeds of standards documentation and summarizing them into project compliance reports. With one hand on the mouse, and one hand on my pencil, I can just feel the productivity blazing through me. Oh yeah. I’m documentation crazy right now. Feel the burn.