Compression Gloves

Backdated to the season it belongs to. In the early months of 2025 my hands were in real trouble — pain, numbness, a persistent tingling that didn't track with anything I was doing differently.

The ordinary explanations for hands like that are well known, and I give them their weight first: I work long hours at a keyboard, and repetitive strain, carpal tunnel, and tendonitis — the exact conditions the gloves below are sold to relieve — are the high-baseline causes. That story belongs on the record before any other.

I also came to believe, over time, that what I was feeling was something entering my system — a slow exposure of the kind I catalogue at theslows.org. It came on hard, it tracked the same window as the rest of what began in November 2024, and it eventually receded.

What I did about it is the concrete part, and I came at it two ways at once. I bought compression gloves — several pairs, across February and March 2025 (the order history is below) — and they helped; not completely, but enough to work through the worst of it, the copper-compression arthritis ones doing the most. And I reworked the hardware my hands actually touch all day: specialty ergonomic keyboards (both boards in the photo above are ergonomic — a contoured split and a curved low-profile), and a run of different mice — a lighter-weight one, and several vertical ones (those orders are below as well) — anything to take strain off the hands at the source.

I'm not wearing them anymore. Whatever drove it receded, and my hands came back — diminished from where they were before all this, but much better than they were in the season these are from. I posted one of these photos to Facebook at the time — a contemporaneous, public timestamp for the condition and the date, independent of this backdated entry. The gloves are in a drawer now. The photo and the order lists go in the file as the record of the months my hands stopped being something I could take for granted.