Ravelry

Knitting is painful right now.

A week ago I got a tetanus shot. Apparently there can be side effects like muscle weakness and joint pain. I did not know about that at the time I got the shot. Even though I was not in any immediate danger of getting lockjaw, updating my tetanus booster shot did not appear to be a risky decision. Protection has to be a good thing, right?

Well, for the first few days, everything seemed fine. It just felt like a bruise at the site of the jab on my left arm. Perfectly normal. Then sometime around Friday afternoon my left thumb stopped working. My whole left hand was incapacitated. It's now Monday and I've got movement back, thank goodness, but there is still pain and swelling at the base of my thumb. (Touch typing is painful too, so I have switched to hunting and pecking for the time being.)

I have no idea how long this will last. I do not want to become again that person who must take Tylenol regularly to get through the day. So I'm hoping that it will disappear fairly quickly, especially since it's now been a week since I had the shot.

In the meantime, while no knitting is being done and no Tylenol* is being taken, I am actively avoiding Ravelry. There is a correlation with me between pain and rash behaviour (I suspect this is true of more than just me -- also, not all pain is physical -- but I digress). So I am staying away from volatile social networking environments, just to be on the safe side. Of course, that's a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, but it's the best I can do.

Rash in this case means "acting without due consideration or thought; impetuous". What I can't figure out is whether staying away from Ravelry is itself a rash decision. I gave it due consideration before making it happen. (At the moment, I can't log in to Ravelry even if I want to.) But on the face of it, it seems like such a drastic reaction that it might be considered impetuous.

Anyway, bottom line. If you are reading this and you normally use Ravelry to get in touch with me, instead you can use the email given in the blog profile.

Oh, and if I were you, I'd think twice about getting a tetanus shot -- unless you just stepped on a rusty nail or something like that. You never know if you are going to suffer from nasty side effects or not.

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* I didn't actually last very long without taking Tylenol. Gah! I am weak.