No Gardening for a While

In spite of the slightly lower temps this week, I'm getting no gardening done at all. That on-again-off-again problem with my wrist is acting up this week and causing a little more pain than usual.

The problem seems to have originated when I fell down (shocker, right?) in dance class and landed funny on my hand. It was at my old studio, so it was probably about four years ago, and the pain and swelling in my wrist has shown up a couple times a year since then. I finally had it looked at last fall, and Dr. Mark determined it was De Quervain's tenosynovitis. It was oddly reassuring just to know what it was (versus "you know, that weird thing with my wrist), and I was kind of tickled that it had such a fun name (c'mon, that's nine syllables right there!). But when it's acting up, it's no fun at all -- mainly because it means I need to take it easy on my right hand and that's difficult in a job that requires tons of typing.

Actually, what did the damage this time wasn't typing, but editing by hand. Last Friday, I was helping out our training area at work by reviewing a bunch of quick reference guides and a couple of scripts for Web-based tutorials. Making consistent edits across lots of documents is easier when I'm working on hard copies, so I printed everything out, grabbed my red pen and went at it. I didn't notice any trouble with my wrist at all while I was editing, but when I finished three hours later, I couldn't really feel my thumb. That afternoon, I went to happy hour and noticed that I had trouble holding my glass in my right hand (because of the pain, not the martinis). Saturday morning, my right thumb was about twice the size of my left one, so no gardening.

That's a bit of a bummer, but I figured it would go away in a few days and that I could live with it in the meantime by pounding Advil. But it's been almost a week and it's still not back to normal. I've had to watch a whole slew of lovely evenings go by this week with no gardening ability (particularly bad because I need to get on that powdery mildew problem). I'm going to try some heat on it tonight in hopes of holding off on the recommended-but-dreaded cortisone shot (needles = bad). In the meantime, no gardening. Maybe I'll post on some baseball-related topics instead. Go Twins!