A4 Injured

I got another finger injury on Saturday, and probably won't be able to climb for a couple of months. It's difficult to be positive about this, to keep it from completely overwhelming me with sadness. In fact, so far it's been almost perfectly impossible, as I have walked around and worked in a state of either rage or despair. I guess it's just coming at the same time as a lot of other pressure. Up to this point, climbing has been how I relax, and get away from medical school. Now, I use the stairmaster to do this (which doesn't really do it). Ughh.
I am going to a sports med doctor this week.
I found an interesting paper that demonstrates that ultrasound can be very effective in precise diagnosis of pulley injuries and their severity. I'll do some more reading. I have a passion for this kind of reading that I didn't even have when I was diagnosed with the kidney disease.
Maybe I'll end up being a doctor that climbers can specifically seek out. The idea of being a climber's doctor is pretty attractive. I would love to become an expert in this (field, for lack of a better word) of medicine.
I know I've always been extremely disappointed in the medical community's ability to deal with climbing injury. It has always included the perfect storm of arrogance and ignorance, usually among orthopedists, who are used to knowing everything about everything they need to know. So they walk into the appointment with the same arrogance, only now they don't know anything about climbing, and just act like they do, and despite your explanation that you already know what they are telling you, and you have other questions, they just spout the same old garbage and collect their three hundred f*g dollars for the five minute visit. Or the provider that tells you to "stop doing what you are doing, and take some advil". I had an orthopedist tell me once that, because I was going into medicine, I wouldn't have to worry about my tendonitis any more, because I would not have time to climb anyway, and would have to give it up. I can gladly say that medical school has ignited a passion in me for climbing unlike any I have experienced before, and my training has never been more focused, nor successful. I've trained, and climbed, better in medical school than I ever climbed before I got here.
You can see the anger welling in me. I'm sorry. It's difficult.
I'll be doing a lot of reading about this. With more information, I will be better armed to regain function, understand my body, work on weaknesses in technique and training, and better prevent injury in the future.
Dave Macleod is helping. He's the man.
So in addition to a lot of reading, I'll be doing as much exercise as my body can handle without using that joint for a little while. And then slowly using it more and more as the pulley recovers. This may even involve crack climbing sessions in the gym, but I need to get over the initial period after injury before I will risk it. A week or two, I suppose, before I give anything like that a shot.
I hope I can convince the sports medicine doc to use ultrasound to diagnose it. I'll bring the article in. If not, there will be an ultrasound lab available to us as medical students some time before the end of the year (hopefully). Given the opportunity, I will learn to use this technique on myself, and watch the thing heal over time.
So weaknesses to work on:
Lateral epicondylitis - more extensor training, massage, better ergonomics at my computer. More supination / pronation strengthening (brought in my pipe wrench from the tool box in the truck), too.
Cardiovascular - I need to get my cardiovascular endurance up to the level of my anaerobic strength. I would like to form some cardiovascular habits now, while my finger is injured, that I can maintain once I am healed. Like I said, my current thing is the stairmaster. It's pretty much totally awesome because of how hard it works me. I can also use it as a mindful activity - don't use the handrails to improve balance, and do maintain the best posture I can the entire time (this is a big challenge for me, improving my posture. I've had poor posture since I was a little kid, and decided some time around 2009 (I was 26, and saw myself hunched over in a store window as I passed it) that I just hated that I looked like that. It's been an extremely challenging process trying to correct it, but it's improved dramatically. Sarah, for instance, who has only known me for a few months, says she never notices any problems with it. Personally, I still see room for improvement.). The other nice thing about the stairmaster is that it's pretty fun to see that whole "you are burning 900 calories/hour, and you have climbed 87 flights of stairs". Somehow this just sounds more impressive to me than the numbers the other machines spit out. It's exactly the sort of thing that's nice around here, in this land of pancakes and pancake topography, to counteract all the flatness.
Mental training - It does very little good to walk around acting like my life is over and everything sucks, just because I have a finger injury. There are lots of ways to look at it, but constantly torturing myself by saying, "You will never get better, you will never get better, you will never climb again, you never climbed that hard anyway, you never got to do project X (Glass Bowl!), you never got to do project Y(Glass Bowl! Flash Gordon!), this is only a precursor of painful, debilitating things to come as you age, until you reach a sharply declining slope into physical weakness, senility, and soon thereafter, death. You will never get better," just isn't all that helpful.
Crack climbing - Assuming my finger allows me to do this (a toss of some sort of gambling device at this point), it will be nice to sharpen my crack skills. I haven't done that much crack climbing in the last couple of years, and, really, none, since I moved back to Minnesota. I found myself falling on 5.11 and 5.11+ training cracks in the gym that I had totally wired when I lived here before. I would really enjoy getting back into that.
Cracks in the gym:
easy handcrack (5.9)
big hands, overhanging crack (5.9+/5.10a)
big hands through stepped roof crack (5.10+ Yosemite/5.11 most other places)
easy easy fingers, hands, fists, mild offwidth "natural" crack (5.7)
easy easy easy corner finger crack (5.6)
tough, overhanging off hands, and tight hands lead crack (this is the good one) (5.11+?5.12-?. Haven't been on a crack like this anywhere else.)
hard off-fingers crack (good for developing that pain tolerance) (5.12)
chimney (5.8)
smooth stemming (usually there are a bunch of holds of the previous two, but if you skip the holds, you can make them harder. The chimney is 5.8 or 5.9, but the smooth stemming is akin to the strength needed to climb something like El Matador. Ie. feels nasty hard.) (5.10++)

So all of these would be fun things to improve my technique on. When I had my finger injury in 2005 (Insidious, chronic damage to A1!, from too much overhanging lead climbing!), cracks were the only kind of climbing that I would/could do for months. It would be nice if this injury allows me to do the same. It's nice starting, this time, in a place where all of these techniques feel pretty familiar already. If I have the chance, I can really hone some skills, here.
Other deficits in my physical fitness/ability? - Always searching...


Other news:
The Pale King is an embodiment of everything I love about David Foster Wallace.
Aeneas is still stuck in Carthage (which, from the sound of the queen, isn't all that bad), while I read DFW.
My little book is picking up more momentum, and remains fun to write.
Medical school is still happening.