a slap on the wrist
In hindsight, my wrist might have been sending me a warning sign when, for the past three weeks, it hurt every time I put weight on it. Possibly that was not something I should have ignored.
But, in my defense, putting weight on a flexed wrist (like the top part of a push up) is very different from holding a trapeze bar, a rope, or basically any part of a hoop. As far as my (limited, mostly apocryphal*) knowledge of anatomy goes, my hand should not have freaked the heck out during hoop class on Friday night merely because I pulled up on the top part of the hoop. But there you go. Color me bewildered.
So I took about five days off to deal with the fact that my right hand seized in pain whenever confronted with such everyday objects as doorknobs and sink handles, much less trapezes, and to try to figure out if I could train myself to write with my left hand (answer: not legibly, not in five days). I have basically no idea what I did to it or what's happening under the skin, but it never swelled. Since swelling is my only red flag to go to the doctor--barring such subtle indicators as major blood loss or loss of limb--I have not gone to the doctor. The doctor would probably tell me to quit monkeying around on trapezes. Therefore I have resigned myself to living in ignorance.
Five days felt like an extremely long break, especially since I haven't quite gotten to the end of my post-Showcase high, so last night I went back to hoop. I only irritated it a couple of times--and it was for a really cool new skill, which I feel should balance it out. (My wrist feels otherwise.) It helps that I just now discovered the power of two incredibly simple things: tape and icy hot. Taping my wrist makes it roughly 100% less tweakable than it would be without (possibly because I can't flex or twist my wrist significantly). And icy hot is friggin amazing. I have no idea how some menthol has given my wrist full, painless range of motion mere hours after I made it angry by hanging from a hoop. Magic, probably.
After being nice to it and judiciously applying magical icy hot, my wrist is more or less functional, although pens continue to thwart me. I'm realizing, however, that this may be one of those things that never actually goes away: my right wrist, after all, is both my dominant wrist on trapeze, and the hand that uses the mouse/track pad and all of that carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing stuff. It gets the worst of all possible worlds.
I'm now making a concerted effort to use my left hand more for trapeze, but I'm also reconciling myself to the fact that I may have a cranky wrist for a good long time. And as with any injury, I have been given many opportunities to reflect on the marvelous fragility and complexity of the human body. You only get one. I mean, I do have another wrist, in this particular case, but it can't write its way out of a paper bag, so I had better start taking good care of the right one. I have a long career of awesomeness ahead of me (if I may freely toot my own horn), and how am I going to accept all those congratulatory hand shakes and high-fives with my left hand? Now you see the full extent of the problem.
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*So excited that I got to use "apocryphal" in a sentence.
