My physio warned me that the steroid injections would come with side effects, and he wasn’t wrong. To start with, a strange sense of tension in my wrists (that’ll be the extra fluid within the carpal tunnel, then) and then very faint pins and needles in my hands (that’ll be the extra fluid aggravating the nerve, then). My advisory information sheet suggested that I “rest the area for at least 24 hours” and that I “not undertake prolonged, vigorous activities for 48 hours”.
That’s all well and good, but how do you define “rest” for your wrists? Luckily for me, there was the small matter of the American election to provide me with a little distraction, and so that evening I went off to west London to a friend’s house for an Election party. I Twittered a little bit, but mainly was just clicking between various different news outlets’ election maps to see how things were going. And I gave up even that when my wrists started to get a bit antsy.
Wednesday, the aching started for real. Although not what you could consider pain, I really didn’t want to make things any worse than they already are so decided to err on the side of caution. I’d been up until 3.30am, and had only had four hour’s sleep, so a nap helped both restore a little functionality to my brain and give me an opportunity to truly rest my wrists.
Now, four days later, my wrists are very much improved and, although there is still a little discomfort, I don’t feel that I need to rest them as much as I have been doing. This means, hopefully, that I can now resume pre-injection levels of typing and writing, although I’m not going to go back to pre-CTS levels of typing until I am sure that everything is ok. Which means that Kits and Mortar is still on ice for the moment.
The other side effect of all this is that it means I haven’t touched The Revenge of the Books of Hay since Monday. In a way that’s disappointing, because it’s rather interrupted the momentum that I had built up, but in another way it’s given me a chance to think about a small problem that was turning into a bit of a roadbloke. Hopefully I can have a good run at it tonight and tomorrow and, perhaps, the climax might hove into view, and then it’ll be all downhill next week.
Of course, once the handwritten version is done, I need to type it all up, and I already know that the second draft is going to be substantially different to the first. But then, you know what they say: Writing is rewriting. It’ll be nice to be at that stage, though.
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