One-Armed Blogging

By Geek Goddess on July 7, 2013 • ( 2 )

Touching your forefinger to your thumb is what separates us from the lower animals. Call me Puppy.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I had surgery on my CMC joint last week. It was an outpatient surgery, and I was out later that afternoon with my left hand wrist and elbow covered with a thickly padded splint. My thumb is immobilized. Being a big proponent of the opposable thumbs, I have found myself unable to do many things with my left hand which I usually take for granted.

My thumb is splinted so that I can’t bend it, meaning that I cannot touch my forefinger and thumb together without straining, which hurts a lot. I suspect I’m not supposed to do that. Many things I can manage. I can fix simple meals that don’t require knifework. I can pour myself a drink if someone opens the wine bottle for me first. I can get. I can get dressed if I wear things that pull on with elastic waistbands and have a shirt big enough to slip over my cast. I can brush my teeth and more or less comb my hair. I can feed the dogs and water my flowers.

But I can’t do the things that I normally don’t think about. I can’t get my hair put into a ponytail. And you probably wouldn’t think of this, but it’s very hard to get a bra fastened with only one hand. I’ve managed it the few times I needed to leave the house this past week, but it wasn’t easy and I had to take one of my pain pills after. Which then required a nap.

A friend suggested that I try out one of the dictation programs to do my writing with so I did little research and found Dragon Express for $50, which was one of the cheapest ones around. I’m lucky I didn’t buy it, however, because after reading the reviews I realize that it doesn’t work on the current Mac OS version I now have. Other versions of Dragon cost even more so I’m not going to spend money. However I did find that the new Mountain Lion OS system has a dictation feature, which is using to compose this. It’s not great, and it doesn’t recognize all of my words, but I think it’ll do for now. At least I can get Kitty and the other bloggers a break.