[powerpress]
After the meaningful experience of making a Kaddish for Mira’s dad on his would-be birthday with Mira last night, I’m back to stunts alone again tonight.
I’m in training to play the opening lines of kaddish while lying on my back (see this recent post to catch up if you don’t know why), and I decided to make it harder for myself for a while by doing it with a heavier horn. Tonight’s kaddish is played supine on my Lawson descant horn, which is a heavy five-valve beast with two thumb levers that operate three valves (one lever moves to rotors to change from Bb to f alto, and the other adds an F extension or an A or stop crook).
Since I’m having trouble with my left index finger, I’m not doing the trick of moving the crutch between my index and middle fingers, but tonight I found that the stress on my injured finger is actually even worse when I’m just gripping the horn normally than when the crutch is putting weight directly on the injured finger. I can’t imagine why that’s the case, so I’m planning to bring my horn along to my hand therapy appointment tomorrow in the hopes that my PT can help me figure it out and perhaps also help me brainstorm a more ergonomic solution to the problem.
My finger hurts so much now that I actually want to ice it. I hate icing, and do you have any idea how hard it is to ice the inside first joint of your index finger? My PT wound some single-use icing tape around it once, with some effort, and it felt great—unfortunately, I don’t have any of that lying around. I’ll have to ask her where I can buy some. In the meantime, I need to go make do with a big old gel pack that will freeze my whole hand before my index finger starts to feel anything. (Whine, winge, whimper, complain.)
My hand therapist is wonderful! She fabricated several support gizmos for me to try, and even let me take a scrap of thermoplastic home to try making some kind of a crutch for upside-down horn-playing. She wants me to bring my horn along next time so we can look at the problem together. I’m optimistic!
She also spent some time treating me with light therapy and ultrasound, and on the way home I picked up several packages of Koldwrap for icing my interoccii muscle. I used that most of the afternoon, and my finger is feeling much better. I’ll wrap it again for the night.