or: how pain, that has long overstayed its welcome, still continues to haunt me rent-free
that perpetual ache you have within your awareness, that has been there for so long..that you don’t really recall any life you’ve had without it. the ache that started in only the most recent summer of your life...but for the life of you, you cannot remember when it started, or even the how. or even the initial moments of the perpetually present pain, that you’ve tried so hard to be rid of. but this ache. just cannot find heart to leave you in peace.
i’ve read so much fiction, so many stories across, what feels like lifetimes. i’ve listened to so many songs, that leave this feeling in me. i’ve seen, and felt so much..life, as well. that barred my soul to this agony. people that turned out to be not what i’ve had impressions of. people who have, said goodbye to me..for the better.
it’s been far too long since it’s been in me, that i could not, for the life of me. tell you when and where it began, and i ended.
oh how i wish i could claim that everything in the above words were true.
oh, no, no. that would be much simpler. that would be like, if my life was on ‘simple’ mode, dear reader. unfortunately, i sit with the fact that the universe simply chose not to give me the easier way in life. universe just opted me out of the ‘easy life’ list, apparently.
no. what i’m talking about is this stupid as fuck hand - that keeps fucking - hurting - at every hour of the day - at every waking instance - fuck, ow, it hurts, oh god, why does it hurt so much, i’m not even particularly using this stupid hand for anything that requires it to weep with agony like so - fuck - fuck - shit - ow - okay -
okay, mish. breathe. breathe. okay. i’ve breathed in. okay.
today, 18th april 2026, marks the sixth month of my bastard hand acting like this. oh, the problem with the hand must have started a week ago to that date, probably. hell for all i knew, this pain was latent all along since birth. and decided to show up, for some reason, only then. how would i know. the universe has always insisted upon blessing me with the most dramatic and delightful of experiences upon me.
back then, i was just in the second month (third month, if you count those measly 10 days in august) of my first semester, first year of engineering college. i had just started out as a computer science engineering student. yes. i chose computer science engineering, because....the reasons are not relevant to this hand story anyway. and my life trajectory has dramatically changed since then.
so. what the hell was i doing in first semester?
well. our wonderful, marvellous college had a very...let’s say..non traditional way of teaching us computer science.
see, from my knowledge, in a typical computer science course in college. every semester you’d have around 6-7 (heh.) subjects. these subjects would be like that of the school ones. like, ideally, you’d be taught all of them at the same time. and you’d ideally take your finals for all of them at the same time. there’s a reason this is the traditional method of teaching and doing education, it’s not based off of just vibes.
my college decided to be very unique in their approach of teaching, actually. they decided, no no. the traditional method is too useless for us. it’s too enriching for the students, and we get too less profit. let’s do something else.
this something else was. how do i even start.
let me start by saying that in a semester, there’s some non programming language subjects like the ones of math. then there’s the others that focus only on programming languages - like c and c++. our very nice college split the subjects into these two categories because they came to a conclusion that the students would not be able to focus equally on both the programming subjects, and the theory heavy subjects. my college is also very job oriented. meaning, they are dead set on every student getting some job, some placement in 3rd/4th year - to the point that they’ve abandoned the concept that students need to fucking study to get marks, and thereby, cgpa. for you know. placements.
did they care they were wrong? nope. did they do something with these conclusions, in whatever non-empirical methods they used to came to them? yes.
which resulted in this ludicrous system we’re following in the college now: block teaching.
block teaching is where they take the programming & programming related subjects, and teach them for 15 days continuously. which means, for 15 days, we don’t have any other subjects to learn. in college, all 6 hours, we’re expected to sit and consume the same subject continuously. and this is for programming languages. which means we’re expected to pick up a language from scratch and master it in the same 15 days. well, master it enough to bullshit in the finals anyway, finals which happen right after those 15 days are over. we’re also expected to type away for the entirety of 6 hours on our systems, doing leetcode-akin problems. we all believe this is for cultivating the 9-5 office-like environments in us, so that we don’t complain. or have it easier when we go to our actual jobs.
look. reading this, and on paper. this sounds easy. one subject for the entire day. no other subjects, which means no other homework. also, we should probably be thankful because, this develops the expectations one should have from the workplace, the ethics and whatnot.
as someone who’s lived through this nonsense for two semesters, i’m saying that this is the shittiest system i’ve had to endure in my entire life. hell. i mean i reckon this is harder than whatever is going on in hell. this is the fucking system that might have made me disabled for life, and i have huge prayers on the might part.
i wasn’t kidding about the typing away for 6 hours part, actually. these 6 hours are what we have in college.
this block teaching nonsense started the first day of our first semester actually. 20th august 2025 was our first day. if i remember correctly (and how would i not.).
the first subject we had was programming paradigms and problem solving. in which they taught us html and css. or at least gave us a two minute talk, in the entire 15 days we had on schedule. who knows, not me. i wasn’t listening to most of the classes. i had mentally checked out on the second or the third day. we all just typed on our systems anyway. i was physically okay during these days.
after those 15 or so days, we had c, which started mid september.
as a cbse computer science student, i already had some mastery over python. c was okay-okayish. the problem was that the workload (calling it homework would have been generous to the work itself.) had somehow doubled after the first block teaching. i reckon, it does make sense. programming and paradigms nonsense was the basics of programming languages anyway, and we weren’t doing much coding. as opposed to c. i felt like i was babysitting the language when i was actually learning the language. coming from python, it definitely felt like a downgrade.
the first few days - i think - till the second or so week of october, my hand was fine. no problems. the only entity that was getting fried was my pretty, little brain. and that was fine.
what was not fine was. me getting fucking zapped by my hand sometime in the following week. i don’t fucking remember when or what it was. but i remember the feeling very well. even as i’m typing this up, my hand still remembers the fucking zapping. it’s like the entire insides of your hand are on perpetual fire, and that you are pretty much helpless to do anything about it.
at first it was just the zapping, as far as i remember. i started googling out the symptoms and everything, as one does. google search, and chatpgt, and my father, all cheerfully informed me that i was probablysuffering from de quervains.
de quervains is just this based french sounding little syndrome that basically means that if you have it, your tendons near your thumb base and the wrist, are on fire. because you’ve overused those little tissues or whatever they are.
now, look. i’m not a biology student for a reason. i have no idea where to even start explaining what the hell is a tendon, or why it gets to inflammation, etc etc.
this little syndrome basically rendered my hand, my right hand, my beloved, my darling, completely. fucking useless. meaning, i couldn’t (still cannot) type. write. grip anything. carry anything. without pain flaring up my arm. at first, it was so bad, i couldn’t even leave my bed. the hand would be in constant pain, constant agony, and whatnot.
we, foolishly, stupidly thought it would resolve itself in, like, 3 or so months. my father told me this from experience. he had it a while ago too, after all.
so when i wore the ahem, wrong wrist brace, people did ask me what was going on.
i did not have enough anything in me to tell them it was tendons staging a drama or whatever. what did i do instead, you wonder? i started telling everyone it was nerve damage of all things. nerve damage. the fuckING NERVE OF PAST ME -
dear reader, do you believe in manifestation. for i do. after this very illuminating phase of my life.
six months later of that fateful day of my hand pain getting worse, well, for the worse.
i have this apprehension in me that it was never de quervains in the first place.
or maybe it was, and with me going around telling everyone it was nerve damage of all things,
perchance the universe was like, sure, here you go, nerve damage it is, for you.
because this devilish hand pain, that started as hand pain, now goes upto my shoulder. de quervains isn’t supposed to do that. yes, i accept that this hand has gotten me out of chores like carrying bags and cooking and whatnot. but. this same hand has made living fucking painful for me. typing? fucking pain. writing? even more agony. grip? non existent now. studying? a study in hell, perhaps.
as someone who loves to write everywhere, in notebooks. and during class, when the class is exceptionally boring (and when is it not.) this agony made it purely traumatising. especially in the initial days of the pain, where i had discrete math, for like, 4 hours in a day, and that math man was exceptionally strict in not allowing to us to use our mobile phones in class. was fucking forced to listen to his classes. it was mind numbing. my hand had already numbed by then. my mind thought, why not join the hand too. as sympathy. fUCK YOU MIND, WITH YOU FUCKING SYMP -
all that said and done. i don’t really understand what caused this. but i’m pretty sure this college is the reason. recall that 6 hours of workload you read about, earlier? that might have done my hand in. or maybe i’m just too weak for computer science. mayhaps it was fate. who’s to say.
it’s like. slowly losing your sight, when you were blessedly born not blind. except for me it’s this hand that i use for every fucking thing. and oh. the agony is so undescribable to anyone not living it. it’s this constant thrum under my skin, inside the hand. now i’ve had it for so long, i quite literally cannot remember, or imagine, my life without it. even in dreams, where my future plays in front of my eyes, somehow. somehow. this disability follows me.
i wanted to do a lot of things this year. involving this stupid appendage obviously.
which i cannot do now, not without the fear of losing it completely for life. yes it’s gotten that bad. or maybe i’m catastrophising, as they say.
as i’ve liked to say in the past few months -
the devil couldn’t touch me, so they cursed me with this agony so bad, that it feels like they visited me. and ruined me anyway. just like they have always wanted to.
