Some Things in Life Suck: A Long-term Guitar Injury

Likely, the worst event of my life was getting tendinitis so extreme in my right and left arms & hands that it is speculated the tendons are significantly scarred. The lamentable events occurred when I was 24 years old, 1991, but the pain still troubles me till today. It delivered my career as a musician stillborn - not able to practice, play shows or do any of it consistently. In '91, I was playing guitar obsessively, working in a print shop and as a cashier. Like 99% of artists in my position at that time, I had no health insurance and no sick leave. The tasks I was required to do at work aggravated the injuries significantly. (I would go on to become a security guard for 2 1/2 years: the only job in the world I could find where I didn't need to use my hands). And there was great ignorance on my part about these types of injuries.

The obsessive guitar playing was an avoidance technique for crushing and debilitating OCD thoughts (undiagnosed until the early 2000s) I was experiencing and was utterly unable to control. Only sinking into guitar playing could deliver me from the extreme torment. A repetitive stress injury developed – it went largely untreated for the reasons noted above. I took two years off from the instrument to rest the right hand, only to return too quickly, seeking to play at my previous level of duration and thereby permanently injured my left hand and arm.

I think of it today because, as I go through another bout of stiffness and aches in my left arm and hand, I'm scheduled to play guitar in a theater piece that opens in two weeks. I've gone through this set of feelings dozens of times over the last 30 years - tremendous hunger and longing to play the show, but simmering dread at aggravating the injury or being unable to do the gig. It's a wretched feeling - so excruciating that I try to give up give up on the idea of playing at all in order to avoid having to go through this set of feelings again.

Ultimately, I am grateful to have other creative pursuits I've been able to access – poetry, acting, dramatic writing, translating. But playing an instrument is its own world. A world so close, so far. I still dream of getting the proper therapy to get back to playing regularly for long stretches and without fear. I start a new round of therapy in a couple of weeks... 10/14/22

Update 8/4/23: The diagnosis I got from the hand specialist was tennis elbow. After a couple of rounds of physical therapy, the PT said I also have golfer's elbow. We completed 11 rounds of treatment over three months and there was no improvement. The PT believes my diagnosis is incomplete, especially given the chronic stiffness and weakness in my hand - symptoms that fall outside of the range of golfer's or tennis elbow. YouTube algorithms tumbled me a PT video about radial nerve entrapment and my lay person feeling is that it might be what I am dealing with. Now I go back to my general practitioner to report on all of this and hopefully get another appointment with the hand specialist MD to do further tests and update the diagnosis and finally return to therapy to address the actual injury.