I thought I should elaborate on something that I've touched on briefly once or twice over the last while, but since I've been busy (did I mention that I've been busy?) I haven't had time to go full-on whinge about. Well, I'm not really going to whinge today either (much). More like just explain the recent short posts and the lack of doodling.
Some years ago I buggered up my wrist. It was stupid: I was hurrying to set up tables before an event, I was angry that the group who'd used the room before and should have known better had left things in a mess, I was ticked that my volunteers were late, and I was stupid.
Oh, sorry. I said the stupid thing already.
As you can imagine, banging around with folding tables while in a pissy mood can easily lead to injury (and, in these days of stricter OH&S monitoring, an incident report. This was a while ago, though, so thankfully stupidity isn't on file). It did. I sprained my wrist badly.
Made the event I'd been preparing for even more fun...
Anyway. As anyone who's injured a joint knows, once it's damaged it's easy to damage again. And again. And that's what's been happening to greater or lesser degrees over the years with my wrist.
About... what? two months ago now?... I sprained my wrist again. It happens often enough that I have a splinted brace on hand (which makes it a pain in the arse to type, since the curve in the splint has a tendency to hit random keys and take me to places that I don't want to go), and started wearing it again.
This is the part where my skin comes in. It tends to be a bit sensitive, and a few years ago I developed a small patch of adult-onset eczema. And by the way, my absolute sympathy to anyone who dealt with eczema as a child. It must be hell. Well, long-term use of a brace on sensitive skin can cause a few problems. You wear the thing and you constantly find yourself trying to scratch under the edges. You take the thing off and you're nothing but itchy. And, despite regular use of an eczema cream that's actually quite good, apparently if you're me when you're half asleep you find yourself scratching your skin raw.
I've woken up to some really disturbing sights in the morning, believe me.
So I switched to my lighter, smaller elastic brace as soon as I thought it was workable. That lasted... oh, I guess a few days.
Then I resprained my wrist lifting a full pot while making supper. Too much weight, and suddenly I found myself pretty awkwardly twisted.
Damn.
I, of course, wasn't wearing any brace at all at the time. Did I mention stupid?
Back to the splint, then, no matter what happens to my skin. My poor, poor, skin. The basic background colour is red wherever it's had contact with the brace. Add in the peeling scabbing from where I've previously scratched. Then add the current scabbing from recent scratching (which I'm trying my damnedest to stop. It's sooo haaard) or even from just rubbing against something since the skin itself is so damaged at this point.
Yeah, a picture would be worth a thousand words, but even I'm not going to take that one. Or maybe I will, but just for my own Never Do This Again files.
As far as the wrist itself, as I said before the brace makes typing a pain so I've largely avoided it. Doodling is a bit of a joke with a wrist that's either immobile from splinting or shaky from being braceless, but I'll probably give it a try later. Anything else? Being less stupid comes to mind, I suppose, but it's hard to break such a longstanding habit.
Incidentally, I'm completely braceless today to try to give things a break. Anyone care to start the clock on repspraining?
On the count of stupid...
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