Yes, you CAN injure yourself on the computer

Man, a lot of water has gone under the bridge since the last time I wrote on here.

My time has been used a lot lately with the endless pursuit of making CustomTacos.com take over the world. The latest round of revisions included switching the discussion forum system over to vBulletin and giving the site a major face lift, which includes a more CSS-y approach to the code. Side projects include basically re-arranging much of the content on the site. ;)

Thanksgiving weekend was the perfect time to make these changes, considering the long weekend and the amount of work to be done. We enjoyed Thanksgiving with my parents and then headed back to Richmond so I could lock myself in my room for the rest of the long weekend. I actually had enough foresight to take Monday off from work so i'd have enough time to complete the changes. It turned out to be the perfect amount of time to make the upgrades.

I ended up putting somewhere around 60 hours of time into the changes between Friday morning and Monday night. By early Tuesday morning, users were visiting the site again and all was good. Except one thing.

I began noticing some numbness in my left hand, but only in my ring finger and pinky finger. Do most people call that the "pinky finger"?? Well, I do. I thought nothing of it for the first few hours after waking up, but then began to wonder what was causing it. I spent the next four days trying to figure out what was wrong with my two fingers. Lots of things crossed my mind: Stress? Poor circulation? Blood clot? Burnt skin (from a hot plate)?

And then Friday evening Olivia and I were sitting here on our computers as usual and we began searching around online for some info on my mysterious problem. We started reading about carpel tunnel syndrome, but found that it only affects the thumb, pointer, and middle fingers. Those three fingers are all "serviced" by the carpel nerve. The other two fingers are both serviced by the Ulnar nerve. Curious that they're together and I'm having problems with both..together.

So, we began searching more and found many more cases of something called Cubital Tunnel Syndrome or Ulnar Nerve Syndrome commonly found is guitarists and..you guessed it..computer users.

The ulnar nerve comes from your spine and then down your arm, over the end of your elbow and then down your forearm, across the palm of your hand and then splits to your pinky and ring fingers. Think back to the last time you hit your "funny bone". You hit right near your elbow, right? And the strange sensation traveled from your elbow right down your arm and out to the very tip of your pinky. That's your ulnar nerve talkin' to ya.

Well, I've apparently damaged mine. As I understand it, the ulnar nerve is typically damaged/pinched/whatever at the point where it travels over the end of your elbow. When I sit and work on the computer, my elbows are typically rested firmly on the table so my hands can scatter about as I type with no regard for my 6th grade keyboarding class.

So, here I am a week later and my fingers are still very much numb and tingly. I find that working on the computer tends to aggriovate them..and me. I'm finding that my two "gimpy" fingers have become very clumsy in their numb state and cause me to miss hitting the shift key when necessary sometimes. Luckily, if you find typing errors in this entry, we can both blame it on the fingers.

So, I guess I'll probably be calling a doctor tomorrow to figure out what to do. Hopefully I've caught this soon enough that it can be easily reversed. Otherwise, there are a few methods of surgery that can be performed to get me back on track. I'll post more on here when I know more.

In other news, we found out that things are going so well over at our new neighborhood that our house should be ready a month early - sometime in June. Yay!

Posted by Jeff at December 5, 2005 11:43 PM