I came away from the hand doctor yesterday with better news than I expected. I have carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists and elbow cubital tunnel syndrome on the left side.
The carpal tunnel issue is in theory fixable by surgery, but we're going to try a month or two of occupational therapy and sleeping with my wrists in splints before taking that step. If it does come to surgery, I could be typing again within days, but would have to avoid heavy lifting or putting pressure on the palm for much longer. And frankly, I'm not all that eager to have my hand sliced open.
For now, the doctor advised me to "use common sense" about keyboard time. So I'm going to take a couple weeks away from my WIPs as a sort of sabbatical. I think they need more time to stew in my head anyway--I'm not the type who outlines or prewrites, but before I was published I used to think about each story for months or even years before I started writing them. I can't afford that long of a process anymore, but I think I've been pushing too far in the opposite direction by trying to write my ideas as soon as I have them.
As for other things, I'm not going to keep to a strict blog schedule with Favorites Monday, Research Wednesday, and so on, but I'll do short posts as I feel like I have something to say and generally hang out online if I can do so without making my hands worse. I'll be doing considerably less recreational netsurfing, though.
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