My Hands

Happy day after Christmas.

I have kind of a weird thing going on with my hands. It doesn't happen every day, but when it does happen, it seems to be in the evening, just as I'm going to bed. Or maybe I don't notice it until then.

What happens is that the joints in my fingers kind of stiffen up, most noticeably the second joints down from the fingertips. It makes it difficult for me to close my hands into a fist. It feels almost as if there were an invisible pencil lying across my fingers, preventing me from closing them.

The first time I noticed it, I just squeezed really hard until I closed my fingers. That worked for my right hand, but it made my left hand hurt like hell all night and into the next morning. I finally took some acetaminophen (a word I am only now learning how to spell – on my first try, I got every vowel wrong except the first 'a'), and that cleared up the pain.

So what is it? Arthritis? Some kind of repetitive stress injury? Carpal tunnel?