# Marcy Prochaska: Hammered Dulcimer

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## The hand specialist

My first appointment with the physical therapist with the hand specialty was today.

Yes, they will watch me play and tune more regularly to make sure I adapt appropriately. They, meaning my PT and another one in the office who is a musician.

Yes, they taped my left thumb to support that fallen joint that Martha noticed last weekend, and it feels pretty good so far — we’ll see how it works when I tune today and play tomorrow. The PT says I have hypermobile joints in general, and that works against me in this case.

We also checked various pinch strengths, did ultrasound again followed by nice massage, modified the nerve glide exercise I was doing, and emphasized putting my hammers down, shaking my hands out, stretching, and rolling my shoulders back between tunes. I might also be able to get some pipe foam (the stuff you use to insulate water pipes) to make the grips on one pair of hammers bigger, so that I can alternate grips as I play, so as to avoid having the muscles in the same position all the time.

She shares my concern that the new finger-hold, wrist-motion hammers might just exchange one kind of problem for another, but perhaps alternating using both the new hammers and my regular hammers might be good.

I feel fairly hopeful.

Posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 12:26 pm in the Hand injury category.
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