A Cautionary Tale of Tendons And Terrors
You make your living with a keyboard, and you can’t use your keyboard. What do you do?
Abruptly, this question confronted me at the beginning of 2020, and I think it’s a question we copyeditors and proofreaders face and ponder privately more often than publicly, among our comrades. Of course, if you’re working from home with coworkers around the world, there isn’t much opportunity to chat about these things around the water cooler or on lunch break.
Ergo, with the idea that someone out there might, reading this, stave off some anxiety and pain, I commit to the page some of the finger-seizing terror my tendons and muscles have recently inflicted upon me, how it came on quickly and without much warning, and what I’ve done to get myself back to the page.
Gee, my finger’s sore… wait, my house is on fire
Long documents and long hours — for years, that’s what I preferred. I liked to work all day on a work day, and I liked consecutive days off when I wasn’t working. Coupled with the fact that a fair amount of my personal life is digital, my work-life preferences meant that I sometimes worked 12–16 hours at my computer desk a few days per week.
This preference and habit started in university and persisted beyond the time that I noticed my backspace finger emanating a dull pain from my middle knuckle — no swell, no sharpness, and no pain lasting longer than a night’s sleep. No red flags. No, just a little bit of dull pain, experienced in the last few hours of any long edit, specific to my right ring finger. On less work-heavy days, I noticed nothing more than occasional tightness in my wrists and in my forearm. Otherwise, I felt great. Years passed.
Then, one January day the pain in my backspace finger continued into the following day, then the day after that, then February. On the inside of that finger, the pain began to extend itself from my middle knuckle in both directions: both back to my base knuckle and on past my top knuckle, stopping just short of my finger nail. Since I pay my mortgage with my fingers, dexterous and delicate, I was now mildly concerned.
The physiotherapist, Lynn (kindly and hip: Lynn), said my forearms seemed tight.
By the end of my first session of physiotherapy, we had poked a bodily hornet’s nest that would explode from my right ring finger, sting its way up my arm, seize my neck and back for a week, and creep down my other arm.
All of that pain had been there the whole time; I just hadn’t felt it yet.
The leg bone’s connected to the hip bone
Accompanied by the vexation of financial precarity, this swarming discomfort that seemed to begin in my finger and move to my back started, in fact, where it seemed not to have been. That is, said Lynn, my neck is tight, behind one shoulder blade, and the muscles and tendons there are connected to my forearms. Which are tight. My forearms are connected to the backs of my hands (tight), housing my delicate digits. Those are tight.
Ah… Let me briefly digress: I mislead you just then when I implied all this trouble started in my neck. While my butt is on my seat, given that my butt is connected to my back — the top of which is my neck — well, my seat is connected to my right index finger and contributes centrally to the pain. You know, come to think of it, my computer screens are, in a certain sense, connected to my eyes, in turn to my neck, and ultimately to, yes, the middle knuckle of the ring finger on my right hand.
It all becomes very complicated when one tries to specify the single or central cause.
Wherever it started, it left me here: Sore, worried, pinching pennies, and thinking about the stability of my career choices. What was clear is this: To fix the finger, we had to unsettle and readjust the rest of my body.
Sitting long’s the new smoking
Nudged on by dear, thoughtful Lynn, we did what I do any time a particular problem doesn’t seem to have a particular solution: Get macro, a phrase that should be longer than eight letters. Given the recent discussion in the health community about all the ways that sitting will inevitably kill you, the simple metaphor is this: The easiest way to avoid lung cancer from smoking cigarettes is to not have started smoking.
In more literal terms, that means something simple and obvious: Live healthy before you get unwell. This oft-uttered phrase, “live healthy,” is one whose gravity isn’t so obvious before a health care professional speaks it flatly and privately, so as to communicate the naked truth that one has failed to grasp the depth of the thing. In the end, it’s an imperative to be vigilant. It’s a system-level solution to system-level problems: problems like the ache in the middle knuckle of the ring finger on my right hand.
Preventative medicine
With the proviso that my issues are unlikely to be exactly your issues, let me offer the general tips and strategies that have helped me to recover. I can’t yet say I’ve fully plumbed the mysteries of healthy living, but I’m back to editing for as long as my vigilance lasts, I think.
- Physical setup. Repetitive strain injuries are, at root, about having too much of the same thing. They are also, in part, about having too much of an awkward thing. Both can be partially addressed through careful choices of hardware.
To avoid too much of the same thing, I now have three different mice of three different types: a trackball (left), a rollerbar (middle), and normal mouse (right). This variety in hardware lets me rely less on my right hand. I’ve also reprogrammed my keyboard to reduce my reliance on modifier keys (e.g., “Shift”), which can induce cramping.
To avoid awkward positioning, I replaced my desk chair, adjusted my screen height, and put a wrist rest below my keyboard. My desk chair was too low for my long legs; it sat slightly lopsided, and it did not comfortably support my arms, which meant my back was braced in an awkward position. My screens were too low, which meant my neck was braced awkwardly. Screens should be approximately eye level, it turns out.
- Work structure. Needless to say, I’m not now working long hours on any day of the week. Instead, I’m trying to be about consistency, working a few hours every day. I try to work for no more than an hour at a time. Then I get up to stretch for 20 minutes, at minimum. If Lynn could say one thing here, I think she would say, “Avoid long sessions of sitting.”
- Stretches. Alongside consistent physical activity, consistent stretching is the smart thing, if not the crucial thing. I think it’s common for us text-editors to focus on the arms and wrists, but I must emphasize that the body is not nearly so simple. The stretch that brings me the most relief is as follows: Fold a towel in two or three, and then roll it up. Lay it lengthwise on a yoga mat. Lay on the towel, centering it on your spine. You can move it up or down, or something thicker than a towel for a deeper stretch.
When it’s too late to avoid: Treatment options
If, like me, you find yourself waylaid by a small problem grown big, you can use stop-gap measures such as Voltaren and ibuprofen to get you through a day. I’ve found Voltaren to be particularly helpful in reducing swelling and therefore pain.
The odds are good, though, that if you need something like that to get you through your day, you’re going to need more systemic changes to get you through your months and years. Professional advice is probably the best first step. In the meantime, it’s never too late to start stretching.
