Squishy surgery recovery, and: home improvements, oh boy.

The recovery: As I mentioned last week, I had carpal tunnel and trigger finger surgery on my right hand on September 11. The stitches came out this past Monday. Everything looks good (I'm sparing you a pic, "good" being a relative term), but I have to wear the wrist brace part-time for another week, and then only with heavy activity for another four weeks. Also for the next week, I'm not supposed to do any pushing, pulling, or lifting of anything heavier than a cup of coffee (actually what the PA said was that the weight limit was five pounds -- I didn't ask where he gets his mugs). So it probably wasn't a good idea for me to vacuum and mop the Saltillo tile floors today, but they were too gross to let it go another week, thanks to the construction project I'll get to in a sec.

The other thing I'm supposed to be doing is exercising my right hand by squeezing something three times a day. He said a stress ball would work, or a rolled-up towel if I didn't have a stress ball. "No worries," I said. "The towel won't be necessary." 

Part of the collection. I have more at the office.
Lynne Cantwell 2026

He's lucky I didn't start listing them.

***

Home improvements, oh boy: It was just last summer that I was explaining here on the blog about swamp coolers and how well they work for cooling here in the Southwest, including in my apartment, which has never had any sort of whole-house cooling because 40 years ago, Santa Fe would get maybe two 90-degree days a year.

I'm now eating my words, because this summer was brutal. This was the hottest summer ever recorded in Santa Fe. We had 63 days where the official daytime temperature reached at least 90 degrees, with two days in August hitting 98. It was also really dry this summer. And because the water tanks on the swamp coolers only hold enough for about four hours of cooling, I couldn't leave them on all day when I was at work, or leave the house for more than four hours. So I'm having a mini-split system installed.

Because my condo building is such a unicorn, it is taking the installers way longer than normal to put the thing in. The initial estimate was two to three days; tomorrow starts week two. It doesn't help that the monsoons have finally kicked in, which means no outside work when it starts thundering. I'm not complaining about their safety, or about the rain, which we need (we're in "exceptional drought" status). I just, y'know, want to have my cake and eat it, too.

One advantage of getting the mini-split installed, besides not dying from the heat, is that it's a heat pump system. So I'll be able to get rid of some or all of the electric baseboard heaters in this place. I need to lose at least one because the mini-split system will need one of those breakers. Mini-splits are supposed to be much more efficient than baseboard heat, so I'm hoping my electric bill will go down, despite adding A/C. Stay tuned.

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Alert hearth/myth readers know that I am constantly looking for ways to further gussy up the condo. So to take my mind off the installers making construction racket while I was working at home this week, I started thinking about a replacement for the perfectly serviceable ceiling fixture in the kitchen. The fixture that was there when I bought the place got damaged in the aftermath of the second flood, so I picked up the cheapest possible LED fixture at Walmart and paid an electrician to put it in for me. It works fine, but it's doing zero for the room style-wise. So I went spelunking online for flush mount ceiling fixtures that would work with my Southwestern boho vibe.

I ran into the same thing I always run into: "boho" gets you stuff draped with strands of white beads; "rustic" gets you stuff with pine cones and fake antlers; "Southwest" gets you Kokopelli. Add "copper" to the search parameters (to go with my cabinet pulls, etc.), and you end up with ugly industrial-style stuff, or else "modern farmhouse", which I'm told is on the way out. Add "blue", and you get nothing at all. 

I've settled on this one for now. (Maybe I can spray-paint the base antique copper.) I'll wait to order it until the mini-split saga is over. At least swapping out a single light fixture will be quick and easy. 

***

These moments of blogginess-in-progress have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Giving myself a hand, and; hardening DC.

Didja miss me?

I took last week off for two reasons: I had a friend in town for the week, and I had surgery on my right hand on Friday the 11th -- a carpal tunnel release and a trigger finger release for the middle finger, all in one go. Here's how things stood after I got home that day: 

Lynne Cantwell | Sept. 11, 2026

The Sharpie mark on my middle finger was put there by the surgeon so he knew which finger to release. I was okay with that.

I have since graduated to bandaids covering the incisions and my trusty wrist brace over them. I've slept with wrist braces on both hands for probably 30 years, ever since I read somewhere that they would keep me from waking up howling from nerve pain in the middle of the night. The technician who did the nerve conduction study on me said I was lucky; for a lot of folks, the braces stop helping after a few months. He also said that some patients have the nerves in their hand actually die. Luckily mine never have -- although they are bad enough that I will need to go through this for my left hand, too.

Anyway, I am hopeful that I can lose the whole works tomorrow morning after the stitches come out. Which is a good thing, because now that I'm seeing this brace 24/7 instead of for a couple of minutes every night before I turn out the lights, I'm noticing that it's pretty well worn out. The Velcro tabs still stick -- that's usually the first thing to go -- but a hole has developed at the base of one tab where it's sewn to the fabric of the brace.

I can already tell a difference. I noticed while driving this week that my left hand gripping the steering wheel was going numb, while the right hand just hurt where the incisions were -- no numbness. It would be amazing to have neither hand go numb while doing normal things like driving. So now I hope to get the left hand done as soon as they'll let me. 

Sleeping without wrist braces? What a concept!

I'll report back.

***

Fun fact #1: We used to blame repetitive stress injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome on lousy posture while typing or doing other repetitive movements. I can't tell you how many times I've been advised to keep my arms and hands in a neutral position when I type. But it turns out that's only part of the story. The Johns Hopkins Hospital website lists several causes of carpal tunnel syndrome, but the one that researchers tend to consider more likely is not years of typing before anyone ever invented the term "ergonomics". It's heredity. Women tend to have narrower carpal tunnels than men, and we are ten times more likely to experience carpal tunnel syndrome because of it. And it can run in families.

All these years I've been blaming my messed-up hands on typing 40 pages of copy a night at Zapnews. Turns out I should have been blaming my parents. 

Here's an anatomical graphic of the situation. It's the transverse carpal ligament that the surgeon cuts through to make more room for the nerve.

Stolen from Medical News Today | Sophia Smith

Fun fact #2: You can make it worse when you sleep (see "waking up howling from nerve pain" above) by adopting the T-rex position or "dinosaur hands": sleeping on your side with your elbows bent and your hands curled toward your face. 

Lots of people do it because it's comfortable. Apparently some neurodivergent people adopt the posture as a self-soothing mechanism, and not just while they're sleeping. Regardless, over time, it can compress the nerves in your elbows and wrists and give you tingling and numbness in your hands. This article suggests that if you sleep this way, you could try wearing wrist braces to bed or hugging a pillow or a plushie when you sleep. (I do both, actually.)

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I should also mention that I probably never would have gotten this done except that now I'm on traditional Medicare, which is covering all the costs.

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I've filled up this post with enough medical news that I only have a bit of room to comment on Trump's triumphal arch project. Originally, he tried to sell it as a tourist attraction, including an observation deck. But now he's saying, via a post on Truth Social, that he intends for the arch to include a "top grade Military Complex", complete with drones, snipers, and ammunition storage.

The thing would be built in a traffic circle on the Virginia side of Memorial Bridge. I have driven around that circle many times, and I have questioned all along whether the idea of including an observation deck for tourists was feasible. That circle is crazy busy with traffic. You'd either need to build a tunnel from Arlington Cemetery Metro stop or a series of pedestrian overpasses, one from the cemetery side and one or two from the Memorial Bridge side. And if the arch itself would ruin the sightlines from the cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial, imagine how pedestrian bridges would further junk it up.

But now he's saying it'll be a military platform -- the implication being there would be no need for tourist access at all.

Now, he could be changing his tune because a similar argument worked to get Supreme Court approval for the ballroom project to go forward. That's supposed to be a hardened military installation now, too.

But come on. What is this administration preparing for? A siege of Washington? By whom? Who would those snipers be aiming at?

Maybe the majority of Americans who want him gone in 2028?

Makes me wonder what he has in mind for the entrances to DC on the Maryland side.

***

These moments of medical blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay tuned...

Stay away from rabbit holes; and taking a break.

I want to address, briefly, a thing that's made the rounds on social media over the past couple of days. It was sparked by a Substack post (which I'm not linking to because I don't want to amplify it) quoting a guy who claims to be a former CIA agent and who supposedly participated in an NSA forensic audit of the 2024 election. The purported NSA audit supposedly found that foreign interests manipulated the election results and that Kamala Harris actually won the election.

Here's why I think it's bullshit.

geralt | Pixabay

For starters: The Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency are different federal agencies. The NSA has its own agents. Why wouldn't they use people from their own agency to conduct an audit? Why pick an ex-CIA guy whose security clearances may or may not still be any good?

Second: The feds don't do nationwide audits of election results. Each state runs its own elections and performs its own audits. The graphics you see on TV on election night are pulled from reports provided by election officials in each individual state, and they compile them from results provided by election officials in each individual precinct. Ballots and voting apparatuses aren't even held by a state agency, as far as I'm aware; election officials in each county are responsible for keeping their own stuff under lock and key.

Third: There have been challenges to the 2024 results in several states, and time and again it's been acknowledged that the machines and their software have not been tampered with, and in fact could not have been tampered with. All the challenges were resolved when Biden was still president. Now, this fellow is claiming that some sneaky code disguised as an update to vote-counting software allowed foreign malefactors to mess with the numbers. Really? Really?? Wouldn't the locals have noticed if their numbers changed when they got to the state level? And didn't we go through this with the 2020 results? Except then it was conservatives claiming the votes were tampered with -- and it cost them a lot of money when it was proven in court that they were making it all up.

Fourth: The guy is an author of a book on international human trafficking. His book is available for free. Reportedly it's 900 pages long. I'm not interested in giving him a download, but this poster on Reddit has done it, and here's what he has to say (all syntax issues are the original poster's): 

"This is classic internet conspiracy word salad nonsense. From what I can piece together he believes that the wars in Ukraine, and Gaza are directed by a global mafia that runs Israel, Russia, China, and the United States to name a few of the nations. He ties in human trafficking, slavery, pedophiles, all of it into his global conspiracy. This is the same pedophiles run the world right-wing conspiracies just rebranded by a left leaning audience."

In other words, it's QAnon for lefties. Look up "pizzagate" and see where that has gotten us before.

I could go on (i.e., anybody can get a Substack; anybody can publish a book and upload it for sale; anybody can offer their book for free -- heck, I've done it), but I said at the top that this would be brief. 

What concerns me is the same thing that concerns that Reddit poster: People are taking this and running with it without thinking about whether any of it is plausible.

I know it's tempting to hang onto hope that the disaster we're living through is the result of evil machinations. And social media's algorithms are designed to keep serving us more and more of what we've already consumed; it would be so easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole into a lefty version of QAnon.

But please don't. Step away from the screens, take a breath, drink some water, use the john, and think about how likely any of this is. 

***

I will be scarce here on the blog for the next couple of weeks. This coming Friday, I'm going in for carpal tunnel surgery on my right hand -- something that I probably should have had done 30 years ago. I'll still be wearing a splint on my right hand when next Sunday rolls around, so no blog post from me that day.

Then the following weekend -- assuming all goes well with the surgery and whatnot -- I'll be back in my hometown for my (gulp) 50th high school reunion. 

So let's make a tentative date to meet back here on Sunday, August 24th. I should have lots to tell you about by then.

***

These moments of non-rabbit-holed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe, and go drink some water. Seriously.