2025 - The Year Lost

No, this is not a repeat of a previous year but you wouldn’t be blamed for making that mistake. It seems another year has come and gone with me unable to do much of anything book-related.

It’s true. Towards the end of 2024 I suffered yet another injury, this time in my left arm. After months of fighting with my insurance provider, I was finally able to get an MRI in January of 2025. The MRI revealed that I had a partially torn rotator cuff and subsequent testing revealed that I also had a significant nerve issue in the nerve that we call our ‘funny bone’ in that arm too. This led to 2 surgeries at the end of March, one to fix the rotator cuff and the other to ‘release’ the impacted nerve.

The surgeries went as planned but sadly I spent the next 4 months (110 days to be precise) unable to work or use a keyboard. This meant that I couldn’t type much from late-October 2024 until mid-July 2025. Prior to my surgeries, what typing I could do I had reserved for my day job. Once I released to use a keyboard again, I still found it uncomfortable to type much. It seemed that my arm near where the nerve had been repaired was still very sensitive. My PT and my orthopedic doctor both told me about nerve regeneration and timelines and encouraged me to give it a bit more time to see if things subsided.

Things did not.

This meant that I was back at my orthopedic doctor in October 2025 to be scheduled for new nerve tests and MRI scans. Luckily, the MRI scan didn’t show anything significant. It did show a small ligament tear but it was very small and not likely to be the source of my pain. Unluckily, the nerve test did NOT show any improvement in my nerve. While the doctor ‘released’ it back in March, there was still something impeding its ability to do what it needed to do. It was almost as if by releasing the nerve it managed to get permanently pinched by something in my elbow. And THAT was what was causing my ongoing pain and discomfort.

The fix to this was yet another surgery. This time, the plan was to basically reposition the nerve. And by that I mean that the surgeon was going to delicately pry the nerve loose, pull it around the inside part of my arm, and bury the nerve in my forearm muscle. So now, my funny bone is connected to my forearm muscle. So much for the song about which bone is connected to what because my lyrics will be different than so many others’.

And this, of course, led to more weeks away from my keyboard. But only like 3 weeks this time. However, this put my return to the keyboard around the same time as Thanksgiving. When you have a family as large as ours, holidays end up being a multi-day event. Especially our Christmas celebrations. With so many festive activities going on towards the end of the year, plus work, there wasn’t much time for typing. My goal now is to potentially get my 3 finished yet unpublished works ready for distribution by 2030. But who knows. I can always find something else to break or tear.

So here’s to a happy, healthy, and productive 2026 to us all!