DynaSplint

Is it an orthopedic aid, an inquisitional leftover or a metaphor for something else?  I refer to the spring-loaded wrist stretching frame I wear for at least four hours a day.  Well, not every day.  On the days when I think of it.  And I'm not being seen in public.  And there is someone around to help me put it on -- and at the right time.  DynaSplint manufactures the thing.  And comes by occasionally to adjust it.  But mostly DynaSplint bills.  This quadriplegic wrist stretcher is being provided at what is doubtless a shocking cost, paid for through my insurance...and for what?  

Well, to be terribly frank, to make me look a bit less crippled.  My right wrist has become bent, contractured as they say in the physical medicine biz.  It looks, well, funny.  Or maybe grotesque.  Certainly crippled.  It represents what is the natural course of neuromuscular events.  My right wrist cannot extend, lacking the muscles to do so.  But it can flex, albeit involuntarily, and years, even decades, of too much bending and not enough straightening tilts things in a certain direction.  A bent direction.  So here we are, my wrist and I, and after decades of relative negligence and inadvertence we have what we have.  A telltale deformity common to those with paralyzed arms.  And who cares?

Well, I do.  Or maybe I don't.  The thing is so uncomfortable, the wrist-stretching splint, that it's very hard to say the experience is worth it.  Hours of painful tendon stretching to accomplish what?  Naturally, I told my doctor that the wrist needed stretching to improve my self care.  Help with activities of daily living.  A good way to fight loss of range of motion, this blog's namesake condition.  The doctor did not blink.  Renting this silly wrist splint is doubtless much cheaper than physiotherapy.  If I'd been on my toes, I probably could have scored a few interesting pharmaceuticals into the bargain.  Really, doctor, there's nothing like a little Ecstasy to loosen up your wrist.

The more interesting question is: when do I give up on this sort of thing?  After 40 years with paralysis, when does one just say that enough muscular skeletal improvement is enough?  I've come this far and will go no further.  It has become too hard.  

I don't know the answer.  I don't even trust the question.  Some days, the work of cripple maintenance seems more than I can manage.  On others, it's a breeze.  This very afternoon I sat down to a one-hour exercycle workout with very bad expectations.  At times recently, exercising has been all uphill.  I don't like it.  I don't want to do it.

And there is no more interesting example of this than travel.  I am bracing myself for a difficult trip to London on Saturday.  Why 'difficult' and why the bracing?  Because I was surprised at how tiring the last trip westward proved to be.  This jetlagged feeling in the solar plexus that comes a couple of hours before landing.  Which doesn't make sense, really, because the trip from Europe to California is actually kind of a breeze.  A flight that arrives at 2:30 San Francisco time, midafternoon, represents 10:30 in the UK evening, so I'm home and in my apartment before the really wee hours of time change hit.  So what's the big deal?

The big deal is that I don't know.  Mysterious things are happening inside me.  Call it the grieving process.  Call it anything.  Just don't call me after Saturday, because I'm gone.  And for the first time, and you can call me crazy, I'm feeling like it's going to be a fine trip, not particularly tiring and Elliot, Marlou's nephew, and I are going to have a good time.  On the airplane, I'm going to ask the flight attendants to help me get up and down to pee.  I'm going to restrict my consumption of English cheese and sausages, really I am, honest to God and absolutely no lying, this is the total truth.  Oh, and I'm leaving the wrist stretcher behind.