The Most Pathetic Claw

When I began my job at the ice-cream factory and found out that I would be squeezing hose nozzles all day long, I thought to myself "This is going to be a great! I'm going to get to workout my forearms all the time!" I was, however, sorely mistaken. Instead of growing bigger, stronger forearms, I have been plagued by horrendous hand pain.

The pain wasn't too bad at the beginning. Sure, my hand was sore, but I figured that should be expected since it was being subjected to this new torture I call 8 to 10 hours work days. But over the past several weeks, the pain has only gotten worse.

The odd thing is that the pain is not where I would have expected it to be--either the palm of my hand or my forearm--but is in my fingers. I'm sure there must be muscles inside of my fingers, but I never thought about them until they became painfully aware--in the most literal manner. The pain is more of a dull tightness and pressure running from my knuckles to the first joints of my pinky, ring, and middle fingers throughout the day, but it is much worse in the morning right when I wake up. Since I haven't been moving my fingers for the several hours I have slept, the muscles have become very tight and I can't open them at all for several minutes. Try as I might to straighten those three fingers, they remain throbbing and curled up in the most pathetic claw you have ever seen until I have massaged them and gradually worked them open with my good hand.

When the pain first got bad, I asked a few of my co-workers about it. Assuming it just took a certain amount of time for my hand and fingers to get used to the work, I asked them how long it would take for my hand to stop hurting. The response I received, "When you quit", was not encouraging.

As it turns out, all of the sanitation department suffers from the same hand/finger pain. One fellow employee, a middle-aged Guatemalan woman, said "Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night, and, oh, my God, my hand is on fire. It hurts so bad. I have to rub and rub it and ice it. But what else am I supposed to do? The supervisor's don't like to hear about the pain. When you tell them, they make mad." There was even one employee, who still works there in sanitation, who had to have wrist surgery because of how badly the constant hose squeezing screwed him up. Yikes!

Of course, I have been worried about my hand's well-being, but I figured that if I could tough it out for only a couple of months that there shouldn't be any permanent damage, right? I only have two more days inside of The Ice-Cream Hell Tunnel, and then I will have to just wait and see how well my poor, poor dominant hose-wielding hand springs back from the abuse it has been put through.

Daily Ice-Cream Intake :
1/4 Gallon - Neapolitan Ice-Cream, 1/4 Gallon - Tin Roof Sundae Ice-Cream, 1 Turtle Sundae Bar, 1 Ice-Cream Candy Bar

(see also The Summer of Free Ice-Cream (A Running Tally))