occupational therapy – this gruntled worker

The studio manager issues a gentle reminder that the doors will be open in exactly twenty minutes. I wistfully eye the other holiday market vendors with their neatly-arranged tabes. While they’re chatting away with each other, my husband and I are muttering under our respective breaths while struggling to assemble and reinforce our table with industrial-sized clamps and dollar store zip ties. Our inventory of cat toys, hats, note cards and leather bags is scattered on the floor well beyond the confines of our assigned space. Though this is our sixth year participating, we feel like rookies each time. What is wrong with us? I wondered.

One problem is that we are constantly changing our offerings, which means reinventing our booth display each year to accommodate new items. The other participants, who have a more consistent inventory, literally roll up with single suitcases on wheels and create simple, elegant, and seemingly effortless tablescapes. We, on the other hand, make our way up Broadway with our stuff precariously balanced on a U-Line industrial plastic cart (the kind that caterers use to deliver lunches to office buildings), a metal table that doesn’t fold (though we have a total of THREE folding tables at home) and three new metal grid-wall panels, held in place with a haphazard web of bungee cords. The grid, our latest acquisition, was supposed to add height to our 4-foot table to fit even more of our stuff. And this year, we have lots of stuff.

Let me back up here. Since 2012, my boyfriend-turned-husband and I have participated in this amazing fair, which is organized by our neighborhood yoga studio-slash-community-center. Over the years, we have had our same corner booth location, in the main room near the shelves of yoga blankets and cork blocks. We are always flanked by a jewelry maker and her husband and the (very popular) ladies who have a waiting list for free chair massages. Over the years, we have formed a little family of sorts with the other sellers, and we have repeat customers who tell us that our catnip fish and origami mobiles now grace the homes of friends and family on other continents. This is not bad for a nights-and-weekends husband and wife side-hustle that basically pays for our crafting habit and gives us an excuse to binge-watch entire seasons of shows like A Million Little Things (which, by the way, I highly recommend).

But I digress.

Why were we so stressed out this year? It’s partly because we didn’t do the market last year (AKA The Year of Endless Physical and Occupational Therapy), when my hands and neck were in constant pain. Sewing and crochet, which, along with writing and drawing, were my only stress-relieving outlets, were out of the question. Two months ago, after a year of weekly OT, I regained my strength and stability enough to begin cautious crocheting while wearing a black plastic custom thumb splint I designed with my therapist. I was determined to make as many hats and cowls and cards and cat toys as possible in the limited time I had. Never one to under-do things, I approached my side-hustle, stress-relieving hobby with the ambition and joylessness of a first-year investment banker (I can’t vouch for the amount of joy felt by any investment banker, at any point in her career, but I would have NONE. Ever). This felt like work, not fun.

We eventually did get our table assembled, we sold a bunch of stuff, and we also managed to pack up and get home without losing anything, including our minds, on the streets of Manhattan. As I counted our earnings, I promised my husband that the 2019 market would be different. All we needed was a different table setup and a few small changes to our product line, right?

Exhausted from the day and from pushing our awkward caravan of stuff down eight blocks of Broadway, he offered a weary smile in response.

Next year will be different. I promise.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about my hands lately. Until now, my latest problem was some kind of muscular problem at the base of my thumb that doesn’t fit any singular diagnosis. After three more months of weekly occupational therapy and twenty minutes a day of hand, finger, and wrist-strengthening exercises, I can go for longer periods using my hands without pain. This is definitely progress. I also don’t type all day anymore, which definitely helps.

Now I have a new ailment to add to my keychain of pain: a knobby swelling of the knuckle on the middle finger on my left hand which feels a lot like osteoarthritis. According to the radiologist’s report, my X-rays are “unremarkable.” Not even worth talking about. Hmph. All I know is that I wake up every morning feeling swollen and looking freakishly inflamed, like I have a bunion on my finger. Could it still be arthritis, but just not show up on the x-ray? I feel like all of the problems I’ve had with my hands and arms have been this way: not-quite carpal tunnel, not-quite tendinitis, not-quite pinched nerves. Not-quite legitimate.

I have become quite the complainer.

Regardless of the (lack of) diagnosis, we still have to treat the symptoms. In the world of OT, that means more splints. I got a turquoise neoprene finger sleeve to wear at night (I imagine a factory somewhere where workers decapitate gloves, sending the resulting fingerless remnants to weightlifters). When my pain didn’t subside, she made a(nother) custom splint ($230 billed to Blue Cross), shaped like an old 110-film canister, that imprisons my middle finger between its two adjacent fingers. This is supposed to keep me from overextending it. Instead, it mainly restricts my ability to use my left hand and cuts off the circulation to my pointer finger.

My problem, they all say, is that I’m hypermobile. Allegedly my joints are very flexible and I can hold myself in unhealthy postures to compensate for muscle weakness and bad posture, even in my hands. Giving me a splint usually means that my body will just create a workaround that will do even more damage. And so, the cycle continues.

It’s kind of funny that my body is set up to unwittingly sabotage my progress. Every time I go to the OT “gym” (where the hardest exercises include picking pennies hidden in of a huge blob of putty), I feel like I am being reprimanded for my hyperflexibility. There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere. Am I bending to meet everyone else’s needs, instead of making myself stronger?

Hmph.

Tag: occupational therapy

Hobby Jobby?

Being unremarkable