Success Stories!

This letter was originally posted to SOREHAND and became a source of encouragement for all of us.


The following letters were sent to LA RSI....

Subject: My Story
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997

I'm a Brazilian Chemist.
    I was using computer at the day in the lab and began to develop a personal project (a Laboratory Information Management System) at the night at home: So I began to feel chronic ache in my right hand. I had the bad habit of typing strongly. My keyboard was very hard and failing. I was ever working many hour no Stop at night.
    When I felt the first simptoms, began to use the mouse in the left hand: this gave me some relief. I bought a ergonomic keyboard too.
    For about 5 months I began to look for Doctors. I consulted four Doctors and tried to do what they asked me: I took anti burn-up drugs for about 4 months (in the last month I decided to duplicate the dose, but the efect was the same: nothing), I did sessions of ultra-sound, Paraffin, and some sessions of PGR (Postural Global Re-education). Doing all this and using the right hand the least (I began to type only with the left hand) I didn't feel any better in my right hand.
    I discovered the LA RSI Suppont Group searching in the Yahoo. I printed some pages and began to read (my language is Portuguese). I began to read the pages of the LA... some times: these informations helped me a lot. One of the most important was that there are very few Doctors that Know enough about RSI: it reinforced what I was almost concluding. In the wait rooms of physiotherapyes I met many people with RSI for years without any better. It was very hard to me.
    Using informations from the home page I began to use Ice at home, for about 20 minutes twice a day and felt relief from the burn-up, but not from the chronic ache still.
    Through a link in the LA... home page I bought the book "Conquering Carpal Tunnel Syndrome" by Sharon Butler. Ms. Butler developed some stretches technics when She had RSI. The book has many pictures and exercises for each point of ache (from back to fingers). I selected 2 or 3 stretches I found good to me (they stretched my ache points). I selected stretches for the wrist, fingers and fore-arm. There's a correct way of doing stretches (slowly, without ache, and for some minutes each position). I began to do 3 times a day. Two weeks later the chronic ache was gone.
    In the first recovery month I became dependent from the stretches: I needed to Stretch more if I worked more, to keep the ache far.
    Now (2 months from recovery), I don't need to do the stretches, working as much as before (with both hands). I do stretches occasionaly if I feel the ache is nearing. I changed my habits in a way that type is not more a dangerous task.
    I bought the book at: http://web-star.com/alternative/selfhelp.html
    I created a home page in my language (Portuguese) tring to make a divulgation what I had learned about RSI with some links to interesting sites (like this specialy).

Best wishes,
Fernando Oliveira
fmota@bahianet.com.br

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Lorin first wrote us in March of 1997. Here is his follow-up to that early letter, which also appears below. We appreciate him sharing his story with us and thereby making it available to others with injuries who may benefit from his experiences and insights.

10/30/98
Follow-up, a year or so later

It is now the Fall of 1998, and it has been almost two years since I started following the advice I found on this page to heal my hurting hands. I used ice, ibuprufin, rest, wrist braces, different chairs, different keyboards, stretching execrises, a different keyboard layout, and keyboard macros. All of those things helped at different stages of healing.
    I have several findings to report. My hands are basically great and functional, and I have little pain. Because I am using the Kinesis keyboard, and the Dvorak layout, there is almost no effort at all to typing. I can type all day and not experience any pain. It is even good exercise for my hands and fingers.
    A couple of BUT---'s.

1) I still feel much better wearing the Handeeze gloves. The slight elasticity, the slight grip they have on my hands, and the bit of warmth they give, really helps. If I work without them I have sensations in the meaty part of the palm - what do you call it - the area of the palm on the side where the little finger is. The sensation is not pain, but I have the feeling that the tissue is not your basic standard-issue tissue anymore. It's post-recovery tissue, and a little too sensitive.
    I don't know what would happen if I typed for ten hours without the gloves, but I like having them. Also, I am a writer and get up at 4 in the morning to write. It's cool, and my body has not warmed up yet. The gloves seem really useful.

2) I still use the dual Kensington trackball four-button devices, one on each side of the keyboard. But I notice after several hours of doing mouse-intensive work, my hands hurt a little. It is the sustained cramping movement. I could probably cure that my retraining my movements. I must be using too much effort to move the trackball.

3) The Kinesis keyboard has an option to put command keys on the floor, on a footpedal. That means there is no reaching to do keyboard commands, no control - p to print. I just press on the pedal on the floor to activate the control key and then one finger presses the P. This makes copying, pasting, printing, saving, spellchecking, switching between programs, changing fonts, all those sorts of things, into miniscule finger movements. My toe never gets tired of doing its part. The foot movement becomes as instinctive as driving.
    I found that stretching my hand across the keyboard was a major factor in getting injured. Getting a programmable footpedal is a huge help for anyone who does a lot of keyboarding, and I recommend it highly.
    I still can't use a standard keyboard comfortably. I probably will never be able to. The position of the wrists feels bad to me, and when I do computer consulting I make my client do the actual keyboard commands to run diagnostics on their system. It's slower, but they learn more. When I do use a regular keyboard and mouse for half an hour or so, my hands start to hurt - the tissue protests. So I just don't.

4) For the last six months, I have been working on my posture and it helps a lot. I have been training myself, with some help from an exercise and posture specialist, to sit upright while keyboarding. I take short breaks to do some stretches he showed me - shoulder stretches, not hand stretches. And I do some work to strengthen the postural muscles. The proper posture feels almost military - it is a very upright pose, and has taken months to get used to. But I can feel the blood flow is better, the flow to the arms and hands.

5) I do not ice anymore, but I would start immersing my hands in ice water immediately if I ever felt any lasting pain. Ice really is healing. When I first started plunging my hands into pitchers of ice water, the pain was almost unendurable. It took, as I recall, over a week of doing it every day until the cold itself was not so painful. One thing that helped was to gradually cool the water, by adding more and more ice cubes.
    For the first ten days to two weeks, my hands would stay cold for quite awhile, 20 minutes maybe, after icing them for 20 minutes. But then after ten days something started happening - after taking my hands out of the water, several minutes later they would be very warm. Warmer than usual. There is a rebound effect where the body floods the area with blood, flushing it out.
    I read about this once, it is called "the hunter's reflex" and it's a reflex in the body to protect body parts from frostbite. Anyway, it really kicked in. The first time I noticed it my wife was standing nearby and I told her, "feel my hand" and she flinched, as if I were going to shock her with an ice-cold hand. But she took my hands and they were totally warm, as if they had been soaking in warm water. This effect occurred every time I iced after that, as long as I had been icing twice a day for twenty minutes for several weeks. I don't think it would happen right away now, if I started to ice again.

Lorin Roche, Ph.D.

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