Programmers, mind your hands
This week hasn't been the greatest ever for me. On Monday, I was swamped with support (it was coming in as fast as I was answering it), and ended up still at work at 7:30pm. Ditto Tuesday (7:30pm again), though that was partly because I started the day with a lot of replies to messages I'd sent on Monday (in reply to queries that had come in).
Then yesterday I woke up with a nasty headache.
But today is worse. Today, it has become apparent that I’ve injured my left hand. I’d been finding for a few days that my hand started to hurt a bit in the early afternoon (and I mean, somewhere inside the hand itself, not on the surface and not the muscles that control it). But today it was really unpleasant, a sharp pain, not unlike a bad headache but inside my hand. I tried resting it a bit, and the pain went away, so I suppose it must be a typing-related problem, and since I don’t want to end up like poor Ben Wing, that means typing one-handed and resting my broken hand.
Only, typing one-handed is slow and I make mistakes :-( :-(
I feel about as much use right now as a chocolate teapot.
I get the same pain after long bouts of coding, and I've narrowed it down to leaning forward as I type. I end up supporting my weight with my left wrist -- my right hand moves to the mouse enough that it doesn't suffer the same problem -- and the constant pressure plus lack of movement pinches the nerves in my wrist. When it's bad, it can take days for the pain to go away.
If you have the use of someone else's hands, get them to press their thumbs into the palm of your hand where the wrinkles form a triangle and press perpendicularly to the sides of the triangle toward your wrist. That kind of carpal-spreading massage helps that sharp soreness heal faster.