Thursday, August 31, 2006

So. The Pain

I think typing causes a great deal of my pain. In the last post I attributed the pain to weaving. So I stopped weaving on Tuesday 22nd August. However, this Monday, 28th August - a whole week later, I was in excruciating pain. I took painkillers (which I never normally do) and applied the anti-inflammatory gel twice... eventually I managed to fall asleep after being in floods of tears for about 2-3 hours.

I was so upset partly because it bloody well hurt, and partly because I'm scared for the future. If I'm like this at 25 what will I be like at 30? 40? What on earth will my career be? Part of the reason for applying for a part time PhD is because I know that I can't work fulltime right now, unless I'm working fulltime in say a clothes shop. Before I started my MPhil I was a successful college administrator running a department. I always thought I'd maybe go back to that but I can't - it involved far too much computer use. And really, most jobs nowadays do.

I'm also worried because I'm in a much worse state now than I was a year ago, and I hardly *do* anything now. My arms are just degenerating, despite all the rest and exercises that I do.

And what caused all that pain? Well, put it this way: I finished my first 5000 word chapter on Sunday evening, and spent Monday painstakingly looking up references for footnotes. I had been doing my exercises every 45 minutes, and Mr Bee has posited that maybe the exercises could be causing the problem too. It is possible that the stretches I do for my forearms is impacting on my tennis elbow (which was the Monday night pain). I haven't done any exercises since then, didn't go to yoga today either :( but I will have to restart some general stretching tomorrow otherwise the forearm pain gets bad.

Since Monday I've had a break from the computer by doing a lot of reading in preparation for chapter two. Tonight I'm having a 'catch-up on email' session, and then tomorrow I'll start chapter two. And I have to keep telling myself that during my breaks I don't have to feel bad about not doing any fabric crafts or web-surfing: I have plenty of other things to be getting on with, like going through all my photos and putting them in albums.

And I'm worried about the degenerating thing. I'm going to stop using the anti-inflammatory gel unless it is *really* required: I'll go with 10minutes worth of ice-application first. I don't like using strong medicines, and I do tend to use a lot of the gel. I don't know whether it can cause problems, but I've been using it off and on for a year now.

As for knitting (you know, for when I finish the photo albums ;) ), I'm not doing any until I've finished my MPhil. And then I'm only going to do 20 stitches a day. I plan to put a load of stitch markers in every 20 stitches on Tempting, and work on that. If I can manage 20 a day with no probs I'll move onto do a row of Branching Out per day, which is about 25 stitches per row. Any pain and I'll stop.

I'm sure I must sound like a boring stuck record (which is why I don't post on the Knitty forums anymore, LOL!), but if you do have pain you need to STOP. If you can catch it early then you won't be in such an unbelievable mess like me.

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