chained to a dying animal
Those of you who haven't heard from me elsewhere might be wondering why I haven't been using livejournal these last nine months. Well, ljfriends, that's because I'm all fucked up. Nine months ago, my wrist problems rapidly went from "my wrist sometimes gets tired and achy, so I take regular typing breaks and do stretches" to "my wrists never feel normal, and if I type they swell up and my muscles spasm and I sometimes experience sharp, shooting pain along my forearm, so I try not to ever type." Around the same time, a strange "allergy" I have to nobody-knows-what also rapidly got much worse. Before, my hands or feet would sometimes get strangely itchy in the morning, or if I got too warm. Now, my entire body erupts in an extremely painful stinging sensation, like being jabbed with thousands of needles, if I try to walk around the block in the sun. (I thought the "jabbed with needles" thing might be an exaggeration, until I had blood work done recently and got to compare the sensations -- this actually hurts more than needles.)

So, that's what's been going on in my life. I'm writing to you now using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a voice-recognition program for Windows (it's frustrating and full of ridiculous bugs, but it works okay, especially for e-mail and chat.) I haven't typed much more than a password in four months, and my wrists do seem to be improving. I'm on antihistamines for the allergy, and they make me a little spacey but they mostly work, if I also am careful to stay cool and out of the sun.

Some friends and I went to Japan for a couple of weeks in June, which was awesome, and apparently whatever it is that I'm allergic to doesn't exist in Japan (or on vacation?), so everything worked out great.

I've had some entertaining adventures with medicine and alternative medicine. My doctor claimed my wrist problems were due to "carpal tunnel", but 15 minutes of research on the Internet revealed to me that my symptoms do not remotely match carpal tunnel (I get numbness in the two fingers that aren't supposed to get numb with carpal tunnel, and not in the other three). I tried acupuncture (feels really fucking weird, doesn't work for me), chiropractic (makes lots of loud cracking noises, doesn't work for me, also has an adjective for a name), and deep tissue massage (sort of works a little). Before I found an antihistamine which helps with the allergy (most don't do anything for me), I drank a stinky Chinese herbal concoction which I think maybe helped a little bit, actually. I went to physical therapy, where I learned some exercises to improve my posture, so that now my posture is somewhat better, but my upper back also cracks pretty frequently, which disturbs me.

Anyway, I'm thinking maybe posting on livejournal is convenient enough now that I can start up again. I don't want this to become a journal of my medical problems, so don't expect to hear about anything but the most major developments on that front (really, I promise.)