toasty

Gratuitous incremental update! Enough has happened differently in the past few days that I should probably write before I forget...

Thursday night wasn't so good! I burned my hand pretty hardcore. Actually, they're rather minor burns (I don't remember my burn degree characteristics; feel free to offer up a guess in the comments), but I blistered up three fingers like a pro. Now I'm all antibacterialized and gauzed up - it was impossible not to open up a few of the blisters, either accidentally or on purpose... eewww. Fortunately, this all happened to my non-dominant hand, so I can still do stuff with ole lefty. Also on the bright side, the, umm, "most expressive" finger is now basically splinted straight - very convenient in case I run across certain people I'm not too fond of.

Skipping the obvious negative parts, let's try to find some optimism: at least it doesn't really hurt. My fingers are more tingly than usual, but it's not uncomfortable. In fact, I'd like to look at it as positive overstimulation, like the Wave machine I talked about last time. That is, I'm constantly reminded of all those hand muscles, all the way out to my fingertips; feeling them all the time might help my body rewrite the neural pathways to improve finger control? Maybe that's a long shot, but long shots are often what it takes.

BTW, Effington could be a wonderful effingplace. Thanks for the interruption (and Central Illinois geography lesson), Mr. Folds!

Back on track, Friday's PT session was obviously messed up. We didn't really want to do anything involving hands, so that cuts out a large chunk of the arsenal: no Giger, weights, sitting balance (involves hand weight bearing), arm e-stim bike, etc etc etc. We ended up breaking out the new "pseudo army crawl with body supported/rolling on bolsters" activity from recently, as it puts weight on the elbows and keeps my hands free to slap myself in the face and inadvertently pass the bird to passersby. Again, this exercise set is tough on every muscle from my neck down to below the bottoms of my albatross shoulder blades. Further, my shoulder joints eventually start to sublux under so much pressure. This time was particularly über-rough too, since I didn't have the Giger warmup beforehand to work out all those joint kinks and back cramps. Eh. Is rehab supposed to be lounge around time? Bring it.

After the crawl work was a nice long workout on the leg zap bike. Then there wasn't really anything else I could safely do, so when I was done giving Wii tennis lessons ;-) I cut out a few minutes early. The rest of the day was a giant waste of time, as usual.

Finally, the Steph dropped by for a bit today. Smiles.

Speaking of wasting time, I have concerts to listen to and air guitar to play. It counts as unofficial occupational therapy in my book, anyway - those who have seen air Claypool know I'm not kidding. Hasta luego, mis amigos!