I’ve not been very active on here for the last few months. Towards the end of March I crashed my motorbike and broke my left wrist badly. The bones are healed now, with the aid of a metal plate, but I’ve been left with restricted movement in the wrist, still have a fair bit of pain, and I’ve lost a lot of strength in my left (fretting) hand. In fact , until a couple of weeks ago I was torn between persevering with playing right-handed, starting from scratch left-handed, or giving up guitar and taking piano lessons, as at that point I could only play (slowly) for a few minutes before the pain was too much, and couldn’t fret a power chord or a barre chord to save my life. It was truly the lowest point in my 45 year on-off guitar journey.
Then I went to a Walter Trout gig. During the introduction to one number, Walter shared his story of suffering from liver disease, and being at death’s doorway before a transplant became available. He had a rocky recovery. He was bedridden for 8 months, suffered brain damage, and by the time he was able to get up and about, had lost the ability to walk, talk, and play the guitar. He learned to walk again, learned to talk again, and then spent a year re-learning guitar, practising for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. He then went back to gigging by playing the Royal Albert Hall, no less. Three days before the gig that I was at, had been the 7th anniversary of that first post-transplant gig.
Walter was 63 when he had his transplant, 3 years older than I am now. I realised that if he could come back from what he went through at a similar age to me, that my problems are insignificant in comparison, and I was inspired to not give up on guitar, and to persevere with playing right handed.
I’m still only able to play for a few minutes at a time, but that few minutes is getting longer. I’ve found that by playing in a standing position with the neck of the guitar angled severely upward, with the nut at mere or less eye level, the pain is reduced and I actually can make power chords and barre chords, even the dreaded F chord! I’ve got a long way to go yet, the next few months will be full of one minute changes and finger gym exercises to recover the speed, strength, and stretch in my left hand, and I forsee a lot of work to get the pinky back under full control, but thanks to hearing Walter Trout’s inspirational story, I’ve no doubt that I’ll get back to where I was before (end of grade 2 about to start on grade 3) and beyond.
And the icing on the cake? When even holding a guitar was too much, I started learning keyboard, as a backstop in case I ended up giving up the guitar. I’m playing simple melodies just using notes an octave either side of middle C, can play the C scale with either hand at 70 bpm, and I’m really enjoying it, so I’m going to continue learning both guitar and keyboard, whereas if I’d never been injured, I wouldn’t have taken up keyboard
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