I sprained my thumb. It sounds so small, it seems so small – until I try to use my hand too much. And I do keep using it too much.
So I hurt my thumb, I spend a day basically watching tv/movies & reading (’cause one-handed gaming is hard). I go to work that week. By Friday I felt way better.
My parents scheduled “dumpster day” at their house they’ve lived in for ~30 years. Of course I am going to help! I even do the responsible thing and wrap my hand up in an Ace bandage – give my thumb some support and maybe remind myself not to overdue it.
I overdue it.
I have a business trip that week and spend the week (theoretically) taking it easy and even buying athletic tape to tape up my thumb regularly.
Dumpster Day Part 2 that weekend stresses my thumb out again.
A week of trying to rest my hand while working a computer job (it’s my spacebar thumb -of course).
This past Sat – now week 3 of a sprained thumb – my husband and I needed to do some work. Specifically, we need to re-hang a big fence-gate. It’s two 5’x5′ gates and we had to remove them to allow other work from a pro. When we removed it, the hinges were very rusted so we needed to completely rehang them. Not a hard project, but it takes some labor and we went ahead and applied a bracing 2×4 (the whole section needs to be replaced, but that takes some capital we don’t know that we have now – both money and time).
A few years ago my mother gave me a very nice, hefty (awesome) DeWalt drill. It’s a nice, powerful drill. It required sort of a feather-touch to control the torque. I have more experience with it than my husband, so I end up drilling most of the pilot holes and putting in the screws and bolts for our brace & one of the gate doors.
The only reason we stopped was rain. The sky was about to unload the water (and it did!). We got 2 inches in about 45 minutes (no exaggeration, I checked the rain gauge afterwards).
But I was glad we stopped ’cause my hand was definitely hurting. I iced my thumb and wrapped it (again) Sat night. Sunday I tried to take it easy, keep it wrapped.
It hurts. and I am tired of not having full use of my hand. I have too much to do – work, writing, home projects – that needs two hands. Two thumbs. I’m not good at the “rest” part of healing. I have too much to do.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, ’cause I am at a loss.
Dream by Day 