Hands

[leteeters]

Hey George my hands are aching and stiff as well. When I wake up I can hardly use them at all. The one thing that helps is to put them under hot running water for a while.

[georger]

Hi Earl, yes heat certainly deals with the aches. I put them around my morning cup of tea. I've heated various muscles for 100s of hours over the years, but am still not sure whether it has any long term therapeutic value. My neurophysio doubts that it has but says do it to feel better. One feature of my version of TAM at least is shortening of the muscles or tendons and she has given me some hand stretches. I'm easing into the stretches gradually because too much would do a lot of damage. The other thing she has done is massage my hands and they felt better for a day. This is odd because massage has done absolutely nothing for other muscles. Once again, I don't know whether there will be any long term benefit. What do you think?

[georger]

Hi Earl, I saw my neurophysio again today. She said that there was some benefit in heat before stretching because it relaxes muscles. The stretches she's given me are the same as those at steps 4 & 5 here:
www.stretchnow.com.au/resources/exercises/hands-exercise
I have done a lot of damage in the past with enthusiastic stretches, so I'm being careful with these.

[leteeters]

I'm not sure if there is along term treatment or benefit. I haven't heard of any. I love to play guitar but it doesn't do my hands any favors. I just have a hard time realizing where my limits are. My TAM keeps progressing. Heat and massage seems to be the best temporary relief for the TAM symptoms. Just keeping my eyes and ears open maybe something will come along.

[georger]

Well, I seem to be getting somewhere but slowly. My neurophysio massaged my hands with an anti-inflammatory cream and I've kept this up with voltarin cream. But first I heat up my hands and then stretch (CAREFULLY!) I've had 2 busy days and have not woken up with aching hands. Not a cure of course, but maybe a beneficial treatment. Am puzzled by the anti-inflammatory, because TAM is not known to be inflammatory and this sort of medication has not been of any benefit before.

[georger]

Well, two years down the track my hands are in serious trouble. I've kept up the heating and stretching so that I don't have serious muscle shortening. But I wake up with stiff sore aching hands and it can take days of using them as little as possible for partial recovery. And it's so hard to rest your hands.

I am dictating this via Dragon NaturallySpeaking and the voice to text works extremely well with only minimal training. Other aspects of the program are not so good. There are known issues for installation on Windows 7 that Nuance have not fixed. Help does not work. The command side is a bit hit and miss, sometimes mostly miss. Dragon will decide to stop working and does not hibernate well; as Nuance say, it helps to restart Dragon every time. Anyway, I've just dictated a two-page letter which would have been possible but very unwise by hand.

[Craig Lane]

Well done for finding a voice to text program that works even a bit. Maybe it's my accent or poor diction but I found them to be annoyingly bad for the best part and just useless for the rest. I will have a look at Dragon (sure we should have one or two here in the land of Dragons) I found the only way was to type a little at a time into word or notepad and cut and paste when I had finished. Long winded and I often forget what I was thinking when I started writing. Or as in this case con someone into taking dictation.
It is a bit crazy that our hands cause such issues when there are so few muscles there. Warm is good, but sometimes I have to crush them between my knees or stand on them. It's a bit like biting down on a toothache. Resting hands is a near impossible task but wrapped around hot cup of tea (for therapeutic reasons) is a good an excuse for a cuppa as I can find. The rub of that is getting someone to make it for you or trying not to drop a kettle of boiling water over oneself.
I have found that a good hot sunshine eases the aches and I can feel the heat working deeper as I sit in the sun. I am working on my Doctor to see if I can get some Sun on prescription, may a few months in the Seychelles or Bahamas. Not sure how successful I'll be with all the cuts in the NHS budget but worth a go.
On the anti inflammatory medicine subject, I found Ibuprofen more effective than other pain relief. I never understood why but but was glad something took the edge off. Unfortunately after a recent stay in hospital I have been diagnosed with asthma some am no longer allowed to take them. The codeine just doesn't hit the spot. I have been offered morphine and opiates but as I am in for the long haul I am trying to put these off as long as possible.

[georger]

Actuality the voice to text works extremely well in Dragon. It's the command side that I'm having trouble with. If I say "click [menu name]" then Dragon may interpret this as text that I want to write rather than a command. But if I use the keyboard shortcuts, which I have hardly used before, by saying "press [keyboard shortcut]" then I'm very likely to get what I want.

I'm in touch by email with a long-time user of Dragon and he loves it. He's very disabled to the extent that he makes us all looked like athletes. What I may do is ask if he will give me a demo to show what is achievable with experience.

Dragon did not take much finding because it has been the pre-eminent PC program of its type for decades. I saw a demo of Dragon Dictate about 25 years ago when you had to speak in clipped separate words. I tried Windows 7 speech recognition briefly and found it hopeless; there is a disclaimer to the effect that it's a work in progress. I will persist with Dragon and I think it's the solution.

I'm trying a range of topical anti-inflammatories. They may do something, but it's nothing dramatic. It may be that just massaging it in may help.

Good luck with the Bahamas, seems a perfectly reasonable request to me. When I watch Death in Paradise, it really makes me want to be there. Apart from the murders of course.

[georger]

PS There is some not very good evidence that ibuprofen reduces the effect of verapamil, so I use diclofenac whenever I have a bit of back pain. (Good grief, Dragon spelled verapamil and diclofenac correctly, but I had to spell out ibuprofen letter by letter.)

Just a thought, many countries have volunteer organisations providing technical assistance to folk like us. Many of their members are retired engineers or handy persons, just sitting in their workshops waiting for an interesting project. I know, I was one. A quick search in the UK brought up REMAP - technical aid. There may be others. I imagine that they could make a device to enable you to safely pour the kettle.

[Craig Lane]

Thanks for that Pete. I found Dragon downloading as I write. Looking at REMAP and found a couple of others that may help. Not a direction I would have thought to look. Just goes to show how content we get to sit in our own little pain bubble and suffer in silence.