I stopped gaming when the fibromyalgia became strong. The wrist and hand pain was too extreme, especially if I wanted to continue my career. That pain has improved significantly since then and I have have started to game again. I started off light with turn based games, such as Endless Legends, and the city builder Cities Skylines. I will easily lose myself in one of those games for hours, completely losing track of everything else, hyperfocus (an ADD/ADHD trait) is a curse and a blessing. I have tried some 3rd person shooters, I cannot play those nearly as long before my wrists need a rest. Most recently I started using a controller for racing games, allows me about an hour of game play before I need to rest.

Six months ago I wasn’t even able to use controllers. Within a few minutes my hands would become too stiff, and if I tried to push through, they would become weak. There have been major changes in my life since then, mostly exercise and treatments. The following has helped:

• Yoga shoulder stretches to relieve tension
  • I found three stretches that help me, I encourage people to find ones that work well for them.
  • Be cautious if you have hypermobile joints, it is easy to overstretch and hurt oneself.
• Icing the muscles
  • I ice my shoulders, arms, and wrists, multiple times per day, often working from home on days where I need it more often.
  • I don’t use an actual ice pack, but a cold pack that I keep in my fridge. Ice itself is too cold and will cause more harm than good.
  • 15-30 minutes seems to be a good length for keeping a coldpack on.
• Therapy
  • Chiropractic and massage therapy, seeing my chiropractor has helped me significantly. I went without a chiropractor for two years and it was steadily downhill. Restarted chiropractor therapy and my body is much happier for it.
  • TENS Unit – Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation – I have two
    • Electronic Pulse Massager – inexpensive, but is very useful for spot therapy.
    • Quell – a wearable, I keep it on 24/7 except to charge it. This device helps my entire body, and while expensive, it is worth it to me. It runs an one hour long session every other hour. It communicates over bluetooth with my smart phone, allowing me to change settings see basic statistics. There are negatives, it takes at least a month before it’s completely effective. It also doesn’t work for everyone, but it the company website reports that it works for around 80% of the users. If an inexpensive TENS unit works for you, then a Quell or similar device should also.
  • Medical/chemical
    • This requires a doctor and lots of experimentation. This is not easy, but a good doctor will help. Mine prescribed me a muscle relaxer that I take as needed (usually not more than a couple times per month). Sometimes my muscles will become tensed up and never relax, they forget how to un-tense. The muscle relaxer un-tenses them, allowing the muscles to remember how to be relaxed. This is not a preferred therapy choice as it also relaxes the brain, fogging my thinking, but sometimes it is necessary.
• Ergonomics (with hypermobility in mind)
  • Monitors at eye level, keyboards at the correct height, and a decent chair, all help a little.
  • As a software engineer I’m on the computer all day long, a good ergonomic keyboard is necessary to reduce the wrist motion. While I use the ergo keyboard for programming, I still use a standard keyboard for gaming.
  • Minimizing laptop use as looking down at the screen is not ergonomic.
• Rest
  • Many days I am unable to game, probably the majority of days, and that’s okay. I rest on those days so that I can game or pursue personal coding projects on others.
  • A good pillow. Mine came from my chiropractor, it has helped significantly and I tend to sleep an hour longer with it.
• Exercise
  • When my shoulders and wrists don’t feel strained I am slowly building strength by lifting dumbbells. I just got a new set that allows me to increase weight by 2.5lbs. Small increments are crucial.
  • Walking, I power walk. Power walking is great cardio, but I have to be careful as the arm motions can worsen the shoulder and arm pains. Walking in general helps to build the core and may reduce joint hypermobility.

A few weeks ago, while out for one of my morning power walks, I slipped on wet grass and fell hard. I was trying to avoid a women and her dog, and didn’t realize that I would have no traction on the curb. I did not need help getting home, but it would have been better if I did. I limped for days after the fall, and my hands were in extreme amounts of pain, but I still managed to work.

Now, nearly three weeks later, I still have dull hand pain from that fall. Each day it feels a little better and I expect it to be completely faded the next day, instead the pain just becomes a fraction of one point less. The doctor I see to help with my scoliosis and shoulder/neck pain informed me that I’m experiencing a minor whiplash.

Since the fall I’ve slacked on my exercising. Some stretches, yoga here and there, a little tai chi, but no cardio. Monday night I started cardio exercise again, with some light DDR (Dance Dance Revolution, a video game that uses a dance mat). I felt great that night, but the next day my body was in all sorts of pain, especially the hips and thighs. I still have some of that stamina I’ve been building, but my muscles have weakened and are now out of shape.

Building myself back up, rebuilding what I lost over the few weeks, will not be hard, but there will be pain and aches. The hard part is not over-exercising, which I always seem to do. I’m also hoping that as I rebuild what was lost, my hands will continue to improve. The better my hands feel, the more often I can update my journal. I have some fun hardware projects and software projects to talk about, plus updates to my Aerogarden projects.