Blocks Under My Desk Chair

My mother tells me that my grandfather used to say, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” And this week, necessity caused me to invent. I put blocks under my desk chair.

You see, many months ago I was hanging out at the gym. My friends were talking about their hands (I dunno, it’s the gym, we talk about our bodies very factually a lot. “I wonder how much my thumb could bench?” Stuff like that. Perfectly normal behavior.) and one of my friends mentioned that her ring and pinky fingers fall asleep when her arms are bent. I laughed like it was a joke.

Then she looked at me, clearly expressing with her eyebrows that this was not a joke.

Me: Ummmm…doesn’t that happen to everyone?

Her: No.

Me: Wait. What??

Her: It’s called Ulnar Nerve Constriction. Look it up.

I did. And good gravy if she wasn’t right! So my whole life I have gone around thinking that that’s just a thing that happens – you bend your elbows too long, and your fingers fall asleep. As a kid, I read in bed pretty much every night and I remember having to shift the book from hand to hand every fifteen minutes or so to wake my ring and pinky fingers up. I have literally always just dealt with this and never known that it wasn’t normal. (This is a blog post unto itself, which I actually really thought I already wrote, but apparently not? So we’ll come back to that someday – stick a pointy little pin in it, please.)

But it’s not normal.

And as it turns out, the elbow pain I’ve been dealing with for almost a year now? Yep, you guessed it, it’s connected to my newfound nerve problem. When my arm is bent in weird ways for a while, pain starts shooting through my elbow. Over the last few months, I’ve changed a lot of little details in my life to try to deal with this: I’ve started sleeping on my back, I put a pillow on my desk chair, I started doing “nerve flossing,” which looks as dumb as it sounds, and I’ve been using caution while lifting.

But yesterday, after spending an hour at my desk, the shooting pain started once again. Even with the pillow I stole from the couch, my desk chair was still too low and was putting pressure on my ulnar nerve. Well, I gotta tell ya, I was not pleased. So what did I do? I went straight to the basement, got two scraps of 4×4″ wood, and put blocks under my desk chair. Does it look silly? Yes. Is it entirely safe? No. Have I already fallen off once? Yes. Is it helping? I think so?

But my point here (yes, I really do have one) is that a complex problem requires a creative solution. And despite the fact that my solution isn’t perfect, I am proud that I came up with a solution and tried it. Because people often don’t even try!

So tell me. What creative solutions have you tried for complex problems?