Quivering

Posted on June 17, 2005 in Body Language Medications

My left hand trembles when my fingers go finding each of the keys, their tops erased and sometimes eroded by the acids of my skin. Lithium does this, but not every day. It is doing it now. I hold my hands over the board while I pause to think about what I am going to say them and they look like naked, pink headed parrots shivering in a summer upon a glacier.

A few weeks ago, I went to see my cardiologist. The nurse tried to take the pulse in my right arm. The forelimb flopped about so much that she could not take it. So she did it on the left. I don’t know if she took an honest reading or made one up because the doctor came in and took his own. When I saw my endocrinologist later that afternoon (she works in the same office), I told her not to bother with the vitals because they had already been done. I showed her my hand which she studied for a few seconds before writing me a prescription of her own.

Seeing my hands tickling the air incessantly, you might think it is impossible for me to perform any task involving manual dexterity. I can drive, write, paint, scratch myself where it itches, and type with no greater number of errors than before the lithium. Holding a pen in hand and pressing it to paper does not result in fuzzy, straying lines. My hand writing is every bit as bad as it was before, not worse, not better. These hands of mine just don’t know what to do with themselves when I let them idle. Quivering, they guard their hovering places.

If I hold one of them out so that the palm and the fingers stand perpedicular to the floor, it catches an intangible wind and flutters, flutters, flutters.