A World Turned Upside Down

At the suggestion of a friend, I've adopted a diet that is sans tomatoes and alliums (onions, garlic, leeks, etc). It's helped reduce my pain and inflammation which is great! Two months ago I was taking 8-11 pills a day to manage my pain. Now I can get by on 6. The drawback is that I have to spend a lot of my day preparing meals since everything has to be made from scratch. If I want a turkey sandwich I have to cook the turkey myself because everything at the deli is seasoned with onion and garlic.

All of this does cut down my writing time but I'm hoping it's only temporary. Right now I'm finishing a sic-fi short story that I had to set aside last year in order to write the Eclipse Phase story. After I finish it I'm going to switch to dictation. I've already purchased a headset and Dragon Naturally Speaking. My hope is that once I've trained my dragon and re-trained my brain to write this way my productivity will return to what it was before the arthritis manifested. I'll keep everyone updated on how the integration goes.

The Road Was Already Paved

I entered WorldCon expecting to give the same explanation over and over and defending my decision to forgo handshakes until I went hoarse. That didn't happen. I did have to point the sign out to a few gentlemen who chose not to read my sign because they didn't want to offend me by staring at my chest. Really the only hard part about all of this was when a friend asked "how long until your hands recover?" When I told him "This is osteoarthritis. There is no recovery." from the look on his face you'd have thought that I'd told him that I had six months to live. (To be honest it does feel like that at times. Especially when I think about how quickly my hands are deteriorating.) But other than that it was a relieving, informative, and wonderfully supportive experience!

I felt like such a dolt! Here I was expecting to be this intrepid trailblazer and instead the road was silently paved by many others that for one reason or another made the same decision as I. One man told me that he doesn't do it in order to avoid catching Concrud. Another person told me that they were well accustomed to the policy because a friend of theirs has an aversion to touch.

It never occurred to me that there would be so many other reasons for a no handshake policy and I'm so grateful to them. It takes a surprising amount of courage to say "Sorry, I don't shake hands." We're socially programmed to greet people with a handshake and not participating in that formality sometimes makes the conversation stumble. I'm enough of an extrovert that I can get the conversation going again but not everyone has that advantage. I really feel sorry for introverts that have to go through this.

One of the bright sides to all of this was that a friend helped me figure out a small (future) problem. Eventually my condition will reach a point where I won't be able to type my manuscripts anymore. I'll have to dictate. Dragon software is great but from what I've heard it works better if you compose in long stretches. I tend to work in short bursts so that's not feasible at this point in time. If they have a new version that can do short bursts, great. If not then my only option will be to do a voice recording and have it transcribed like Kevin J. Anderson does. Unfortunately holding a device to do that is something that I can't comfortably do now (tablets = ouch!) so I definitely won't be able to _____ years down the road. My friend reminded me of that a bluetooth headset would take care of that. I love technology.

By the way, scientists need to make this a reality. I would be first in line for the upgrade! I could finally write at Sanderson speed!

Another plus is that one of my local friends mentioned my homemade badge to the folks at the pronoun ribbon table and they thought it was a great idea! So if you see ribbons that say "no handshakes please" at a future convention, you know where the idea came from. I do hope these become available. It would be so helpful!

My New Convention Accessory

So there's a little item I made that I'm going to wear at Worldcon that will accompany me to every convention I go to. It's not something I'm going to enjoy wearing but I also don't dare emerge from my hotel room without it.

You see osteoarthritis runs in the family. For those not familiar with it, osteoarthritis is where the cartilage in joints wears away until bone grinds against bone. My mom has it in her hands and since I'm her mini me I knew there was a good chance that I'd get it too. For her it didn't get bad until she was in her fifties so if I developed it, I expected mine to progress at a similar rate. 

Well, I definitely have it in both hands. I felt the first signs two years ago but it was so minor that I only needed the occasional pain killer. Most of the time a dose of black cherry (a natural anti-inflammatory) was enough to take care of it. A year ago it escalated but I could still get by on the occasional ibuprofen in addition to the cherry. Now I'm taking 1300mg or more of Tylanol arthritis in addition to the maximum dose of black cherry, and wearing compression gloves every day.

Unfortunately there are days when even that is not enough.

Because I'm only 36 and would like to have a functioning liver in thirty years, I'm trying not to rely on pain killers to get through the day. I'm keeping a mental list of motions and activities that are more strenuous than others. Some activities that cause me a lot of pain, like cooking, I can't avoid. And unfortunately there are others that as much as I'd like to continue doing them, for example piano or riding a motorcycle, it wouldn't be wise for me to so. However there are some that I can easily cut out of my life. Yes, you guessed it. Handshakes fall into this category. 

I know. It's an innocuous action and if compression gloves relieve pain than why are handshakes so painful? Well a small amount of pressure relieves pain. A medium amount of pressure -- like that of a firm, polite handshake, hurts a lot. If I'm clasping a hand that's larger than mine, stretching my hand around theirs adds more pain on top of that. Repeat twenty times a day and the cumulative result is excruciating. 

I do realize that wearing a big sign at a convention means that I'll have to explain it 100 times a day. I'm okay with that. It's the price of being proactive. If this does prolong the strength and usability of my hands the hassle will be worth it.