Another Quick Update, Because Procrastinating

Hey everyone! I meant to have this up last Friday, and I’ve got no idea how that didn’t happen.  I have a million and one excuses, but I won’t waste your time or mine with them.

I had a follow-up appointment with my surgeon last Tuesday, and an occupational therapy appointment the following Thursday.  (Rather more driving than I would have preferred to be doing).  Excitingly enough, they agreed that my finger’s range of motion is getting close enough to normal to play cello again for a few minutes.  I can’t play for long, and if I feel any pain at all, I’ll have to stop and give it more time.

The day we’ve picked to try it is this Friday, the last day in May.  It’s six months to the day since the last time I played, at the end of November, and I haven’t played using my little finger since September.  Not surprisingly, I’m quite excited.

My plan so far (after I figure out which end goes up) is to just try a C Major scale, at a few different tempi.  I still don’t think my finger is far enough along to try anything that would require any extensions, and it’s been so long since I last played that I don’t know that I’m up for anything very complicated. 

I’ll leave you with this for now, dear friends, and I’ll let you know how things go. Look for another post Friday evening or Saturday morning, no procrastinating on this one!

Future, v.2.0

Hey guys! It’s been a crazy couple of weeks since my last post.  This is one that I’ve been intending to write since the beginning of the blog, and I couldn’t seem to get it right. I finally decided that “imperfect and out there” is better than “perfect and never shared,” so here it is.

I’ve played music for sixteen years now, and for much of that time I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else with my life.  One of the things I’ve struggled most with over the past few months is coming to terms with changing my goals, and particularly with accepting new goals as being as valid as the aspirations I’ve held onto for most of my life.

As a point of clarification, in planning to be a musician, I didn’t have any particularly grandiose ideas about being wealthy or famous or even particularly successful.  I’ve always known how difficult the music business can be, and I’ve always assumed that I would, in all likelihood, have to have a non-musical job to support myself.  In my mind, though, there was a difference between the starving musician, doing other things by necessity, and actively choosing to pursue something other than music as a career.

My last two semesters of college, when I had to stop playing, my secondary major, Spanish, became my primary focus.  Applying to grad school for my master’s degree in translation felt like admitting defeat, even though it’s something I could easily see myself doing and enjoying. As I submitted my applications, I worried that the admissions people would see something in my essays or letters of recommendation that would tip them off that I was applying only because I didn’t know what else to do.  I had no idea how, but surely they would know that graduate school was just a poor substitute for what I actually wanted to be doing.   Despite the fact that my new plan for my future was more feasible and probably objectively better in the long run, I couldn’t see past my old goals and how my life wasn’t heading towards achieving them anymore.

I’m a different person today than I was when I was five and first learning the piano, or at seventeen when I applied to the music school, or even a year ago when I started planning for the senior recital I’d later be forced to cancel.  While my love for music hasn’t diminished, I’ve discovered other interests and passions that I never could have imagined would captivate me.  The future as the younger me had envisioned it isn’t my best option any more, and the fact that it’s the dream that’s been around the longest doesn’t make it okay for it to eclipse other possibilities.

With a forthcoming move to the United Kingdom for my master’s degree, the possibilities for my future are less limited.  I can travel more, continue to study other languages, and I’ll have the opportunity to get a job in a field I love, instead of slogging away at a day job to pursue music on the side.

It looks to me like it’s anything but settling for second best.

The FrankenFinger

I’ve been crazy busy the last couple weeks, but I’m sick, and taking a day off of classes, which finally gives me a chance to sit down and write again.  My surgery was about three weeks ago now, and, so far, the results seem pretty positive.  I’m working on getting range of motion back, and the scar is starting to look less like a Frankenfinger.  I’m thrilled that the yellow and purple and orange all gone and normal finger-color returned.  In some places it’s not even that noticeable that there’s a scar there.

The first week was pretty rough, all-in-all.  I had a fever for the first four days after surgery, and between that and some pretty trippy painkillers, I did a lot of sleeping and not a lot of anything else.  My wonderful parents took such good care of me for the first few days before I had to go back to classes, especially since this is the busiest time of year for them, as accountants.  That week also included a tough day emotionally—the date that I’d originally picked for my recital, way back before I knew just how bad my hand was.  It felt like a milestone of how much my life had changed from my original plan.  I was still mostly writing with my right (non-dominant) hand, I hadn’t washed my hand since before surgery (thanks to the bandages), and I was showering with a plastic bag duct taped around my wrist to keep my bandages from getting wet.  The increase in pain post-surgery also made it feel like I hadn’t really accomplished anything at all in the past four months.

As my hand started to feel better, I also perked back up.  Eyes back on the prize and all that.  Getting the bandages off and stitches out last week was exciting (and crazy icky, I’m pretty squeamish about my own injuries), but also unexpectedly scary.  With my finger still quite sore, but suddenly without all the padding the bandage had provided, I was pretty sure I would do something awful and stupid to it on accident.  Miraculously, I’ve managed not to do so, and I’m even getting a lot better at getting around with one hand.  Yesterday was snowy and cold (April snowstorm…  Thanks a bunch, Colorado), and I made soup and muffins, and even cleaned the kitchen, all without really using my left hand for any of the hard stuff.  It felt like a pretty big accomplishment for me, after all the time I’ve spent fumbling to do even the most basic of things.

As I mentioned last time, I’m starting to look for a 7/8ths size cello, which is a bit of a challenge since I’m not supposed to be playing.  It would probably be easiest to start the search in August when I’ve got permission to play again, but it’s an odd cello size, and not easy to find.  The weekend before surgery a wonderful friend who’s a cello graduate student, agreed to help me try one out!  The plan was for her to play my cello and the potential new one, so that I could get an idea of what it sounds like, from someone whose opinion I trust.

Of course, sticking to plan isn’t one of my strong points.  (That can’t really be a surprise for anyone.)  When we got there, I couldn’t help but play around on it for a while.  I told myself that I didn’t have much to lose, since I’d be having surgery to fix the problem in a few days anyway.  It was a self-destructive attitude, I know, but I think it was something I really needed to do.  Playing for the first time in almost four months was a lot of fun, even though I didn’t have anything prepared.  I’d been really worried about surgery, and playing again reminded me what was at stake and just how excited I was to get better and get back to it.

I was surprised that my fingertips started hurting before my wrist or pinky—callouses disappear so fast, guys.  I’m not sure that cello was the one, but I have five more months to keep looking.

The next fiveish weeks before I graduate from college (eeeek) are going to be pretty busy, but after graduation I’m planning on starting my research into how best to change my playing, and hopefully over the summer I’ll get a few posts in about that. 

Just a Quick Update

Well, I'm having surgery on my finger tomorrow, I'll be sure to post about how that goes.  We're leaving at 4:30 in the morning to check in at the hospital at 5:30.  Surgery itself starts at 7:30 and should take less than two hours. (Then I can go back to bed and make up for all the sleep I missed earlier.)

The rough long term timeline: I'll go back to weekly occupational therapy appointments in a few weeks, and then should be playing cello again by August or so.

I've started the search for a 7/8th size cello. We're hoping that, though it's not a big size difference, it'll be enough of a difference to take some of the strain off of my hand in the future.

I'm also applying for graduate schools, and I'm hoping to be done with occupational therapy by September, as my first-choice school is in the UK, and I'd prefer not to have to find a new occupational therapist out there.

Wish me luck!

The Start of My Intermission

I don’t really know where to start the story of how the damage to my hand got as bad as it did.  The worst case of tendinitis my hand doctor and occupational therapist had ever seen, a torn tendon in my small finger, nerve irritation in my shoulder and neck that left my fingers tingling if I held my hand palm-up for more than a few seconds, and irritation throughout my thoracic spine, the list just got longer and longer each time I saw a doctor.

I’ve played cello since I was nine; every teacher that I’ve had has assured me that although some reaches were uncomfortable, even painful, my small hand would stretch and get used to them.  Maybe it was true at the beginning, but there’s only so much stretch available, and once I’d maxed that out, I was just doing damage.

There wasn’t a single specific moment when playing cello went from being comfortable to painful, no accidents or injuries to tear the tendon in my finger.  It was a slow, subtle process—lessons started to include more and more conversations about pain and how to deal with it.  I consulted with my doctor, who told me to take ibuprofen before I played.

As the pain got worse, I changed my major, from a music performance degree, to a less intensive liberal arts music degree.  I planned and scheduled my senior recital, then, as I got a referral to a hand specialist and got a diagnosis (complete with pessimistic probable outcome), I canceled it.  I figured out exactly what playing I needed to do to graduate, and bowed out of everything else.  I wrote a paper instead of performing for my end-of-the-semester final jury.

I agreed to set the cello aside for as long as necessary, when nobody could assure me I would be able to pick it back up again.

At the time, as I was beginning to process the sudden changes, I was incredibly angry, overwhelmingly depressed, and I didn’t know how to vent. In the past, when things weren’t going well, when I was sad or angry, I had always locked myself in a room and played cello until things felt better, or at least until I was thinking more clearly.  Suddenly, as everything was going wrong, I lost that coping mechanism.

It was very easy at the time to blame everyone else—the teachers that had made me push my hands further and further past their limits, who had assigned etudes that I had practiced dutifully, exercises that in retrospect were almost certainly making the problem worse.  I blamed my doctor for blowing off my concerns.  I’m sure for a few irrational minutes I blamed my parents for making me with small hands instead of big ones.

I realized, though, with a little time and distance, that there was one person I should’ve blamed, someone that could have, if not prevented the injuries altogether, then at least caught them earlier, when they were less severe:

Me.

I could’ve told my teachers more emphatically what hurt, how certain exercises felt. I could’ve told my doctor that pain meds weren’t the solution I needed.  Most importantly, I could’ve listened when my body told me it was struggling with what I was doing, when my hand complained that I was pushing it beyond its limits.

Ultimately the care of my hands was my own responsibility, and I was the one that failed them and let them get as bad as they did.  The lesson was a hard one to learn, but going forward I hope that, as I relearn how to play, I’ll know how to make my health and wellness a higher priority. 

A Beginning

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”  -Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1889.

The above sounds like a melodramatic viewpoint, but it didn’t seem that way when I was spending long hours in a practice room, and it definitely didn’t seem that way when an orthopedic hand specialist told me that she wasn’t sure if I’d just be taking a break from playing the cello, or if I’d never pick it up again.  After twelve years as a cellist, I found myself with free time I’d never had before and with no idea how to use it.  By sheer luck I managed to scrape together enough credits to complete a music degree, albeit a less involved one than I’d originally planned. I also had the good fortune of being near completion of a degree in Spanish, allowing me to modify my plan and goals for my life after my graduation in May.

The future is a little bit clearer now than it was in November when I agreed to set the cello aside to treat tendonitis, so aggressive I could barely hold a glass, and to find a cure for a persistent popping (presumably of an injured tendon) in the small finger of my left hand.  I’m more optimistic with each passing week that I’ll play again, and, while I’m trying not to get too excited, I’m beginning to look into how my relationship with music and with the cello will change as I return to what I love.

This blog is a multi-faceted project for me.  The initial idea came while looking into alternative creative outlets for when I find myself desperately aching to play cello, but I hope it will also serve as a chronicle for my treatment and recovery, both physically and emotionally, as I learn to express myself non-musically and to fill my time constructively, in ways that don’t involve my left (dominant) hand.   In the more distant future, I hope it works as a journal and resource as I begin to figure out how to return to music, embracing my specific physical needs and learning to play the cello more naturally, more comfortably, and more happily than ever before.

Thanks for coming along on the journey.

~Christa