The View from a Drawbridge

So it turns out that due to my “Great Fall” I now have de Quervain’s Tendonitis. In layman’s terms that basically means ouch! For the next six months, aside from wishing de Quervain had been named Smith, I’ll be wearing a brace, and doing things like ice and cortisone shots and physical therapy. At least it seems I won’t need surgery, which is a huge relief.

But the coolest part about going to see the hand specialist is that they made me a brand new wrist brace on the spot, and I got to watch. Stuff like this fascinates me. Creating things with your bare hands, using a great deal of skill and craftsmanship… it’s amazing.

The technician started off with a soft perforated flexible sheet of something that looked like naugahyde. She let me choose between black and blue. I went for blue. Then she cut it into a really weird shape that didn’t resemble anything recognizable to me. She then dropped it into hot water and placed a pad on my wrist. Then she took the material out, draped it over my arm, shaped it around my wrist, rolling over the edges, and let it harden. And harden it did. The thing is so inflexible I could probably knock someone out with it. It’s as hard as plastic now. (She did warn me that it could melt if exposed to heat, though.) She then added the velcro straps, and it also has a soft pad on the inside so it won’t hurt my wrist. And, thank you JESUS, it allows me to bend my thumb a little, which is something the off-the-rack brace never allowed me to do.

I really admired her work. In a way it’s a work of art, and I told her so. It took a physical therapy degree and then a specialization to get her there, but what a cool career! I’d get a great deal of job satisfaction if I produced specialized apparatuses (apparati?) that helped people.

That’s why, after two years of training and applying to hundreds of dental labs, when that career path didn’t work out for me I went into a profound depression. But things apparently unfolded as they should, because with this wrist brace on I couldn’t have made a dental retainer to save my life. So maybe my guardian angel was looking out for me after all.