After submitting my manuscript for Murder From the Mill: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town (tentative title), I took a short break, but now I’m back at the keyboard. I’m working on a proposal for a biography of a surgeon who should be more well-known than he is. (More on that later.)

Also back is a familiar pain, one in my left thumb’s fat pad, called the thenar eminence. It’s a repetitive strain injury from overuse of the wrist and feels like a tight burning, with a tenderness running over the back of the base of the thumb. Not pleasant.

I put up with the discomfort for a couple of days before it hit me. Hey, what about trying some CBD pain salve? I hadn’t used any since I was deep in my last manuscript. Time to use it again.

So I opened the jar, collected a dollop on my finger, and then rubbed the dollop into my thenar eminence. (Who’d have thought I could use that term not once, but twice in the same blog!)

Lovely, light odor. A soothing balm. I massaged the clear unguent into my hand and forgot about it. Twenty minutes later I noticed that my thenar eminence (THREE TIMES!) wasn’t anywhere near as painful. An hour later the discomfort was gone. That was two days ago.

As I write this post I can feel a twinge in my hand but not enough to worry about. If the pain bothers me enough I’ll just rub a little more salve on. I’m ever so grateful to my wonderful sister-in-law, Jessica Labrie, a Sacred Gaian herbalist. She and my brother operate Mama’s Kiss Cannabis, and it is their pain salve that helps me to write without hand pain.

Why not drop by Mama’s Kiss Cannabis and check out their terrific offerings?

Okay, back to work.