What's going on with Jack's hands?

 

Hello all. If you follow me regularly on social media you've probably been wondering why I haven't posted any art or any updates on my writing in a while. So I'm giving a full update here to let you know exactly what's going on.

Early in August a pain started at the bottom of my wrist. After about a week this had developed into a much more severe pain in both wrists. I went to the doctors and it was diagnosed as tendonitis. I was told to wear wrist splints, take ibuprofen, eliminate as much keyboard work as possible and anything else strenuous on the wrists, this included drawing. I was told recovery could take two weeks.

After two weeks, however, there was no improvement, and so, as instructed, I've been referred on to a physiotherapist. However the NHS's current work load means that it's anyone's guess how soon I'll get to see anybody about this. I've been waiting for a reply since September 6th.

As you can expect, this has been disastrous for my mental health. Not being able to work on either writing or art professionally, or even just for fun, has taken its toll on my momentum. I've been trying to use my computer's speech-to-text system in order to try and get some writing done, but I've had technical problems with it, such as the dictation system bugging out after about 15 minutes. On top of that, I also feel that speaking the words out loud dose not bring across the same authorial voice that typing does, and the work suffers.

It's unclear exactly where things will go from here. I imagine I'll know more when I speak to a physiotherapist but, as mentioned earlier, it's unclear how soon that will be. I'm off on holiday for 3 1/2 weeks next Wednesday. Hopefully some time off will give my wrists the opportunity they need to recover and I'll be back in business as soon as I return, but I'm not an optimist, and fear this could be something that may run on into next year or even longer.

All I can really do is do the best I can. I'll push forward with the dictation to see if I can turn that into something I can use on a more long term basis. I've decided to commission some artists to work on scripts that I'd written previously, so hopefully you'll still be seeing some of my storytelling coming out in the near future.

Thanks for reading, and if anybody out there has been through similar problems, any advice and support you can give would be greatly appreciated.