[AE.Disability] Home Ergonomics
There's an old joke that goes something like, "I told the doctor 'it hurts when I do this.' and the doctor said, 'So don't do that.'"
In a sense, the field of ergonomics is that joke played straight, with the complication being that a lifetime of productivity demands and one-size-had-better-fit-all furnishings has left many of us ill-prepared to register when we're doing something that hurts us, until after the damage has done.
One thing I have to get used to every winter is the way the cold and other associated atmospheric conditions play havoc on my body. Everything that is sore, stiff, creaky, or cranky year-round only gets more so as the temperature drops. And as I get older, these effects tend to get worse.
So when my bad shoulder -- which I dislocated more than twenty years ago falling down a set of icy stairs -- started playing up really badly out of nowhere in December, I wasn't thrilled but I also didn't think of it as a mystery that needed solving. I figured it was just the next stage in my personal Pokemon Evolution of Pain. It didn't fit the normal patten for how my shoulder worked (or didn't work), but it fit an overall pattern for my body.
Then I spent most of the first week of January away from my office computer due to illness and recovering from illness, and as I've been settling back into a work routine it's with a bit of a mental reset in effect. Anything that I changed in my setup not long before the holidays is new to me all over again.
And that's how I figured out why my shoulder's been bothering me.
It just required me to notice that I was straining my shoulder while it was being strained, and not just finding out after the fact when the distractions of the day have fallen away and the ongoing damage has added up to something I can't ignore.
Yesterday, I managed to catch the problem when it started, and thus, figure out what was causing it in the immediate sense, which let me reason my way backwards to how and why this problem had "come out of nowhere" the way that it did.
The culprit, as it happens, are a series of mostly unrelated things I did to make myself more comfortable and to improve the ergonomics of my workspace.
The facts were these:
Ever since it got cold, I have been using a mermaid-style wearable blanket to keep my legs warm when I'm at my desk. I do this every year and I've never noticed it causing a problem.
But this year, shortly before it got cold, I changed my previous keyboard stand out for a flexible arm mounted on the central support column of a laptop-sized sit/stand desk. This stroke of innovation basically gives me a bigger and more versatile sit/stand desk, and when I'm sitting I can still stretch my legs out on a foot stool by putting one on either side of the upright support column.
Obviously, I can't do that with a mermaid tail blanket on, but that wasn't a big enough problem that I even ever had to think about how to solve it. I just turned my chair a bit to the side of the keyboard tray, which was fine, because I could still reach the keyboard by turning my upper body a bit back towards it.
And there's the problem. My right arm, the arm with the bad shoulder, was spending hours at a time straining to reach home row on the keyboard. It wasn't much of a strain, so it wasn't much of a pain... just enough to add up over the course of a day.
And of course, the colder things get, the more I'd resort to the blanket early in the day and the longer I'd leave them on, leading to the impression that the winter cold was the root cause of my shoulder pain.
In the long term, I may revamp my desk situation a little bit so I can use the mermaid blanket and still put my feet up, but for now I'm just using leggings and sweat pants in place of it. Less cozy, but more ergonomic, and less rigmarole involved in getting up and stretching from time to time.
I'd love to tie this off with a moral lesson like "Listen to your body, it knows what it's talking about!", but the thing is that advice like "Listen to your body." works for me the same way advice like "Try not to die." does in terms of specificity. It presumes that listening to our bodies is a thing we all know how to do, but that some of us have chosen not to and need to be persuaded to do so. It works better as a subject heading on a set of instructions than it does as an instruction.
Anyway, when it comes to things like pain management, there have been large stretches of my life where I had no choice except to learn how to ignore my body in order to do what was being required of me via institutional power. I'm very good at ignoring pain, not because I have some magical ability to notice that I'm in pain and make a conscious decision to turn that feeling off (I wish!) but because I had to learn to ignore the onset of pain and certain levels of background pain in order to get through my days in school or my work days in an office.
So no twee moral here. This is just a thing that happened to me, and it's basically luck that I figured out how to stop it from happening.
In terms of replicable advice that can be extracted from a thing that happened to me, I guess it would be that it pays to double-check the most obvious assumption about the cause of something. Everything lined up right, timing-wise, for my shoulder agony to be a symptom of the cold weather.
And in an indirect sense, it was caused by the cold weather.
But there was a more immediate cause that I was able to identify and address, and I'm already reaping a benefit from that.