recently my devices have not been behaving, and are making fun of me. the (virtual) keyboard of my tablet likes to flicker on and off when i am writing and make me click buttons that go underneath when it vanishes - like prematurely hitting 'post now' here on cohost -, and it is so terribly fond of replacing spacebar with the letter 'n' instead. must be some new trend?
my laptop trackpad, which i use for the comfort of not extending my shoulder and elbow muscles at all if i can help it, likes clicking things i do not mean to click if i am accidentally hovering over them when i do not mean to be hovering over them - like the 'x' button in the corner of a program that doesn't save, which i would be at the moment using, or perhaps backspacing thanks to some magical gesture i did not make -, and so when i am typing things i have come into the habit of doing a ctrl+a ctrl+c at the end of every sentence. should i be on a page that will display something different upon reload, i screenshot it as soon as it has loaded.
my phone, on the other hand, with its broken screen, is taking the opposite side and has become underresponsive. it no longer enjoys being handled gently, and stubbornly refuses to obey my requests.
it is of course the fault of the devices. i am pretending i am not noticing the perpetual ache in my wrists and fingers giving way to numbness and shakiness, the increased lack of coordination, the ever extending inability to perform simple tasks with any kind of accuracy, reliability, or stability. i am perhaps in less pain now when i wash the dishes. i have been dropping and chipping more dishes.
it has become so painful to make art. even looking beyond the joy and peace it brings me that little else can, being stuck at home - it is one of few things i can do to earn my survival, being stuck at home.
at some point you kind of need to laugh about it because there's nothing else you can really do. joke about falling apart like unkempt hardware that's become obsolete and no one will bother fixing. joke about being in your glow down era. come up with something funny to turn a bad into an okayish. i'm not giving up on trying to find a way up, but i've become far less enthusiastic about it too. a decade of increasingly more humiliating war with doctors desperately trying to convince them something is, indeed, wrong, only to be mocked and condescended to kind of does that to you. i am certain it is familiar to a lot of people.
anyway, turns out the excruciatingly expensive private PT who never got back to me with the stuff i paid for that i thought was ghosting me for months was not ghosting me ! maybe. seems like, instead, she was being ghosted by the hospital PT that she absolutely insisted she speak to first, despite the fact i was a discharged patient and it was unlikely an NHS PT would just talk to some random on the phone about a patient they no longer have access to files on anyway. which i had to set up. and i know this because finally, three months on, the hospital PT got back to me to say i am no longer her patient and so she does not have any presently relevant information to give the private PT. figures.
this is by the way the same hospital PT i was on the waitlist to see for 2 years, after being referred by a different specialist i was on the waitlist to see for 3 years, and after 5 years of waiting i was given precisely 2 60 minute appointments that were exclusively talking and being examined. i was then unceremoniously discharged with the sage advice of 'taking it easy', wearing wrist braces 'til i am healed', and placing a towel to sit on in my chair. which is of course very reasonable advice to give a patient who's been struggling to perform basic tasks their entire adult life and has been deteriorating for years. no tracy, i really don't think having chronic pain and inflammation in all of my joints for half my life that prevents me from doing most anything is the result of me not taking it easy.
it's hard.