FamiLee Life

Learning to Use My Hands

For the past year or more, I have had some chronic overuse problems with my hands and arms. Mostly my right hand and arm. It progressively got worse to the point where (a) I bought a tennis elbow brace after doing my own internet sleuthing and determining that I might have tennis elbow (b) I went to the doctor who agreed that I had tennis elbow from overuse of the computer (c) I went to the chiropractor who gave me some good finger/wrist stretching exercises (d) I received an ergonomic consultation from the university ergo center (e) purchased some new equipment based on the consultation.

Most of the equipment arrived last week (sans the new chair). I have a new RollerMouse Pro and a Goldtouch keyboard. The new mouse is pretty cool and I think it is helping. The keyboard is also cool and helps to keep a better hand position by bending in half. That is, the keyboard can bend to various angle degrees. This is meant to reduce wrist stress.

What it all means in real time is that I have to relearn to use my hands when typing and mousing. Unfortunately, I never took a typing class in high school. For some reason, typing was only offered to non-honors students. If you were an honors student, you had to take substantive courses. But if you were an average joe or jane, you took typing. Go figure. Anyway, by college, I started to use a computer but my computer usage really amped when I got to grad school. Using what money that I had, I bought an Apple IIsi. I forced myself to not look at the keys, somehow memorizing all the letters on the keyboard. Problematically, I never learned correctly. That is, I can type fast and without error but it's a bit unorthodox. One undergrad student once observed me typing and commented that I was the fasted four finger typer (just my index and middle fingers). Thumb is just to hit the space bar.

Fast forward to today. I am having to learn to not use my right hand to type the letters "G" "T" and "B" (which are located on the left split of the keyboard). I also have to extend my left hand fingers to reach these said keys. It's a challenge but I am slowly learning.

I imagine what life must be like for a person who has completely lost the use of a dominant hand. I wonder if my father would have struggled more, if he had lost the use of his right arm which is his dominant hand. Or maybe, seeing that I have never asked him, he was at one time left-handed. Hence his natural creativity. Hm....

Posted by richlee at October 24, 2006 02:17 PM