Touch wood...

Oh dear – please excuse the jesting and very mild ribaldry. I am ever-so-slightly high with nervous tension; because, in theory (& touching wood repeatedly) my plaster cast is due to come off tomorrow.

Then the real work starts. Physiotherapy.

I’m really, really ready for this now. Just this last week or so, I have had virtually no pain in my wrist or arm. The aching and the cramp have both stopped (touches wood again!) and apart from the thumb I seem to have almost normal sensation and tendon flexing in all my digits. The thumb is still slightly numb and distinctly stiff, but it has stopped twitching spontaneously. I have done my finger exercises several thousand times (creeping out strangers on the Tube and in restaurants in the process) and am now very tentatively doing a little lifting of items heavier than a sheet of paper – a teaspoon, for instance, or a glove... Anything to strengthen this poor wee imprisoned wrist in advance of its liberation.

So I’ll be as primed for the un-plastered state as I can be. My fracture clinic appointment is at ten to ten and my occupational therapy appointment is at eleven. Yes, I am absolutely counting the hours. I have no idea what to expect, and I am both excited and scared. My wrist and hand are bound to be weak and comically stiff, and I may find they are almost totally useless.

I need a working right hand. I have learned to type, and to write, albeit slowly and eccentrically, with my left hand; but I cannot draw left-handed. Left-handed, I can do those art college drawing exercises designed to “free my mind” by producing images that are not so much zen spaghetti as Tourettes’ spaghetti. But I can’t draw anything left-handed that I can learn from or be excited or moved by; just uncoordinated scribble. I learned fifteen years ago that expressive scribble is a great tool. But it is just a tool, and not an end in itself.

And I want to get back to my Scottish Country Dancing club. I am missing the Strathspey something rotten.