Fingers start to fight back after 35 years

My fingers are finally rebelling.

I started typing about 35 years ago when I was in high school, and I’ve been at it ever since. After I decided I wanted to be a reporter, I took — and dropped — my first journalism class when I realized I’d have to use a manual typewriter.

I signed up again soon afterward when the journalism department got a new building and electric typewriters. My fingers just flew on those babies.

At my first newspaper job, we had something called optical character readers, or OCRs. Not stone tablets, as some people who know me think.

We typed on these electric machines, made corrections by marking through mistakes with a black pen of some sort, and took the pages to a room where we threw them in a wire basket. A man who was about 110 years old took them, shuffled to a big machine and fed the pages through. The words came out on paper that was cut into columns, waxed and pasted on pages.

Or something like that. I’m not going to pretend I actually remember the whole process or understood it.

When we got newfangled computers, some of us balked. I remember resisting the change.

My fingers just kept typing, though, and it was easier. I don’t even think about how fast I type. My husband and I went to a store to get a computer a few years ago, and I remember the guy at Office Depot freaking out a little bit and bowing to us when he saw how fast we typed. Do anything for 30 years, and you’ll get pretty good at it.

Now, I’ve got the Arthur-itis, as some people like to call it. Some of my fingers are crooked and have lovely bumps on the joints. I quit wearing rings, including my wedding ring, because I hate the way my hands look.

A few months ago, one of my thumbs started having a shooting, burning pain in it. Sometimes it even woke me up at night.

The worst, though, has been my right index finger. A few weeks ago, it felt like I closed it in a car door. It was hard to use the finger for anything, much less typing, but I had no choice. It finally swelled to twice its size, which reminded me of the sausage-like fingers of a former editor, who hunted and pecked with his two index fingers his entire career.

I was forced to go to the doctor, who said: “In my professional opinion, that looks painful.” Funny guy.

He said my finger had fluid on the joint, and he suggested that I rest it. I gave him a look. “Right — you know what I do for a living,” I said.

So, he gave me gout medication to reduce the fluid. It helped a little. I also had X-rays taken of both hands. The results confirmed what I already knew: I have osteoarthritis, the most common form of arthritis.

My poor mother has arthritis in her knees, neck, spine — just about every joint she can have it in, and she gets cortisone shots, which is probably next on my list. She gave me some expensive cream to put on my finger, and my doctor brother prescribed a low-dose steroid.

Today, it feels like a hot poker is going through my finger as I type, but it’s better than it was.

An amazing friend of mine and my husband’s — a loooongtime journalist — turned 97 last week. He has arthritis in his fingers and gout in his foot right now, in which he had to have a steroid shot last week. He’s still churning out stories.

I think I’ll shut up now.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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