I have started with the manufacture of my dice. I have cut a cross section of walnut root with the chainsaw so that it is about 15mm thick. Today I made it into rough cuboids using my hatchet. I quickly realised when chopping kindling that I am having one of my clumsy days. It is probably not wise to play with a sharp knife. It will wait for another day.

Last autumn I was getting nerve tingling in my left hand, two fingers and the thumb. In 2007 I lost nearly all the strength in my left arm due to a herniated cervical spine disc in the c7-c6-c5 region. I got this as a result of an ippon seio nage judo throw at a sports dojo. On and off some symptoms return nearly twenty years later.

I had an MRI scan September 2023.

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There is clear narrowing around my spinal cord. There is osteo-arthritis. The MRI showed I also have a right sided cervical herniated disc c6-c5. When I drive for more than half an hour I get tingling in my right fingers. It is present now.

Most of the time it is non symptomatic.

Last autumn I visited a brain surgeon / neurosurgeon. It was bizarre. He prescribed be a tapered dose of prednisolone starting at 100mg per day for a week!! That tapered off over a month and I would have had no sleep and been a right royal pain in the arse for a month. He also prescribed an injection of steroid into my cervical spine. From what I have read this is no longer best practice. I did not have any of these interventions.

On my clumsy days the gravitational pull of the earth is somehow enhanced. Everything which can drop to the floor does. There was a bit of left sided tremor too, today. These are probably symptoms on the cervical pathology.

If these symptoms don’t go in the next few days, I may go and see the GP. The one thing I have been doing more of, of late, is screen time on this computer. I can easily stop that….