Standing room only…

Over the last few weeks, I have had issues with my upper spine, the cervical spine – C4 , C5 and C6, very  close to my neck. This has been exacerbated by use of the laptop as I transcribe large chunks of Tobias from paper to the computer, editing the first draft in the process…

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I travel to and from the city weekly and so the laptop is my chosen type of computer but probably not the best if one has physical problems.

I’m not sure how I got the arthritic degeneration thing but suspect it’s actually caused by my posture and that I have been heading toward it for many years. My head has been bent at the neck with a lifetime of hours of embroidery and then when I became a serious writer the hours spent with head bent were much longer.

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So my companions of late have been heat packs, painkillers and a tube of Voltaren.

I finally took myself to my sports medicine specialist a couple of months ago. He bunged some needles into my trapezius and that was wonderful and he’s done it twice since (18 injections!) and now I’m having physio (ouch!),

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but the crux of the matter is the work station.

I needed to change my manner of working and I remembered a wonderful Youtube clip from Michael Jecks in which he revealed his STANDING work station… I was impressed.

So yesterday, I bought a wifi keyboard and my husband rigged a space for me.

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(If you look hard at the image, you’ll see a square mark under my cardi. That’s just one more heat pack!)

It means my back is to the view out the windows (which many writers might like but I don’t) and I am surrounded by glossy books on gardening, famous folk, embroidery, cooking, the Royal Family – in short, anything but the the twelfth century which is very distracting.

If I need to check facts, I have to move into the spare bedroom where my research books are shelved. In itself I guess that’s a good thing because I break my posture, can stretch and move about.

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All of this is, like Tobias, a Work in Progress. It’ll be interesting to see if it assists the problem in anyway.  I’ll let you know…