Hands

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There are two things to tell about my hands.

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First is the story of a scar on my left hand. To me it is very important for people to understand my anger, and uncertainty and why I must research and never take the word of just one person.

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It all started with the "flashback" of my father stabbing me with a fork. It popped up in my head for YEARS until at one point I developed a certain way of coping with PTSD, and would "talk myself out of it" by saying things like "C'mon Judy, this is a fear not a memory, and you control the fear. If you had been stabbed there would be a mark..."

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I looked at my arms as I said it and then WHAM, my eyes went right to a mark on my left hand, that when you look close at it is a series of 4 evenly spaces dots. It was a lifelong scar they blamed on my mother's friend, saying when she was babysitting me she put her baby in my stroller and made me walk, as a result I FELL and she ran over my hand.

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Everything just clicked at that point, coupled with the lies they had told before, like trying to convince me I never heard my father BEAT my mother. Or that the memories of her packing a bag and "escaping" on more than one occasion on the nights he was in a bowling league, like they were just fantasy I made up.

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They actually looked at me like I was the crazy one once, and my father said "your mother never left me, never rain away form this house - you are lying!" I was in such crisis I went and asked the best friend if she remembered when we stayed at her house when my mother ran away, her response was: "WHICH TIME?"

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He had such control over her that he could make her lie, and let me think my memories were fabrications.

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​I became the type of person who had to second-check my memories, to make sure they were not what I now understand to be "transferred memories" - something you are told as a child so often you can describe as if you were there.

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The truth is I do not remember him stabbing my hand, and in the "flashback" he's coming at me with the fork, not telling enough to say where it hit me.

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I DO KNOW he was INSANELY STRICT about table manners, telling us we had to be prepared in case we ended up "sitting at the president's table someday." One thing he was firm about was the left hand being on the lap while you eat, with your napkin, and the right being the only one used for eating. No elbows on the table and NO chewing with your mouth open of course.

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The second part of my hands is that have carpal tunnel pretty bad, as of the "nerve conduction study" I had way back in 1999. I know there are procedures, but if YOU had the medicaid horror stories I HAVE in your closet, you would not want them touching your hands either.

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It seems I just cannot stop the things that hurts them, most of all is the fact that I write with a pen, and used to do so a LOT back before I had a computer.

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I attempted writing my first book around age 12-13, and that was almost 20 years before I had a computer. I wrote and rewrote pages and pages in a writing frenzy, until my hand cramped up and I would wake for days crying in pain at night.

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I don't know if anyone will understand the special little quirk other writers MUST have, but I write lists, I write outlines, I write with a pen.

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The year before I was diagnosed, I also did a LOT of hand-washing of baby clothes, for twins. Until you have to hand wash and wring out baby clothes in a bathtub (times 2), you have no idea how much it hurts the hands/fingers...

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One reason I will state that although my parents were harmful in the things they did, they tried to make up for it in later years, with grandchildren, by doing things like washing my laundry every time she could.

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Besides handwriting and handwashing, I also made jewelry during the MANY TIMES I had to have bed rest due to the numerous "-oscopies" I have had over the years (laparoscopy, colonoscopy, cystoscopy, endoscopy: I have had them all, starting in my early 20s!) and while stuck in bed I went crazy trying to keep my hands busy. I made jewelry or wrote outlines to stories, because I just cannot stand to merely sit and watch TV.

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Female Problems

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