What's wrong with me?

[marcmagus]

I feel as though I've been increasingly falling out of touch with my friends. I also feel that, given that I seem inclined to use this journal as a means of halting that slide out of touch, I'm not posting nearly enough about what's going on in my life. Accordingly, I'm going to attempt to post more, not because I feel guilty so much as because I

Comments

[oudemia]

Well, it is good to hear from you, even if the hearing, she is not so good. *hugs*

[marcmagus]

Hey, wait, I didn't think I'd mentioned my degraded low-f hearing (which may or may not be caused by arthritis in my jaw, which may or may not be related to pain I have in other joints throughout my body). But, as you say, my hearing, she is not so good.

*hug* Thanks.

[fadedpaladin]

Eons ago, I had a friend who had the nerve relocation surgery along with some heavy tendon work around her elbow, due to a combination of sports injuries and RSI from playing the cello. Worked wonders for her. If you go there, I hope it's as good for you.

[marcmagus]

Hey, thanks. That's promising. I'm hoping at the very least it will let me lie down to sleep without my elbows hurting, and maybe even share my bed without constantly having to move around to find a way not to put pressure on a nerve (which both hurts, and I worry is making it worse).

[barometric]

I was previously familiar with the broad strokes, but not some of the details. I'm glad to hear you're moving forward in treatment, and I hope the surgery works out -- my grandfather had surgery for his carpal tunnel (acquired, they think, from his retirement hobby of carpentry), and he's experienced almost total recovery from wrist pain as a result. A different surgery than you're considering, obviously, but perhaps comforting to hear of cases where surgery did help with RSI.

Have you looked into voice recognition software for non-work-related typing? Not sure how useful it would be for coding, but for blog posting and IMing you might find it useful, even if it required using Windows for those purposes. Let me know if you're interested: I was recently offered a copy of DragonSpeak 9 (the first one that was good enough for serious business purposes, apparently), which I turned down because it won't run on a Mac, but I'd be happy to pass it along.

[marcmagus]

Thanks. I appreciate the offer.

I probably won't take you up on it: Windows involves giving up a lot of UI benefits which might or might not compensate for the reduced typing, but there's also my happiness to consider there. I've tried good voice recognition before for that sort of thing and found it to be something I wasn't willing at the time to stick with; I'm not sure if that will have changed. I don't like talking out loud, I don't like the delay between thought and speech [and the extra delay to then get to text which is less perfect than what I wanted], and I don't think I'm capable of producing something the length of an LJ post (or, say, this comment) in spoken word without feedback.

All that said...I should probably give options like that a more serious try, even if I'm pretty confident they won't work well for me for a number of good reasons. Maybe I'll give it another fair shot. I'm not holding my breath, though.

[barometric]

Indeed, dictation is not for everyone. I'm amused, though, at the fact that you find the delay from thought to speech more obtrusive than the delay from thought to typing. I probably feel the same way, when it comes to producing written English, but it's in such stark contrast to my mother, who I discuss writing-methods with frequently, and who dictates everything she writes and cannot imagine having to produce the same volume of work by typing (partly because she speaks at >100 wpm and types at about 60-70).

She's the person who offered me a copy of DragonSpeak; she actually stopped using it because it wasn't accurate enough (for legal-document purposes) to replace human-transcribed dictation, and even for emails and informal letters she found herself totally unable to catch the odd (1%) error it did make.

[soulchanger]

I've been studying nutrition a lot, and since you haven't mentioned diet as a strategy you've tried yet, I thought I'd suggest something that could help

[marcmagus]

Thanks. I'm trying to improve diet in general, but to some extent it's getting lost in the shuffle. (I'm also trying to cook more, but like a lot of the things I'm trying to do, the positive of the action competes with the negative of it hurting [and anything which hurts may also be causing harm])

I'd caught something once about the Omega balance thing (maybe in In Defense of Food?), but I proceeded to forget about it. I should make a note to look into that more closely, probably in a way that works as a positive lifestyle change even if I don't get a measurable positive effect from the dietary change, so I don't give up on it out of lack of tangible results...

[pigfish]

By the same token, I'm aware of at least one article that correlated increased nerve pain with high omega-3 content (and found no significant role for omega-6 content, or 6:3 ratio). I think this is still one of those "hotly debated issues" in neuroscience.

[soulchanger]

The important thing to note about that study was that the subjects were given their fatty acids in the form of vegetable oils - which contain significant amounts of ALA but no EPA or DHA. As I said above that's problematic because the body needs the longer-chain stuff (ALA has 18, EPA 20 and DHA 22 carbons in a chain) and the process of lengthening the ALA is slow and produces a bunch of nasty byproducts. The authors of the study acknowledge that they did not intend to study the entire family of omega-3s and thus did not include fish oils or anything else with EPA or DHA.

The science of n-3s is actually fairly well-understood - it's just that when the media gets a hold of something they compulsively turn it into a controversy even if it means the science gets elided.

[miintikwa]

I'm sorry the wrists have been getting worse! That sucks, lots. But it is always good to hear/see your name on a screen.