The Girl with the Silver Hands
April 1997
When I sat down at my desk and reached for my mouse, a razor-sharp pain tore up my arm from the base of my thumb. I jerked back my hand as if I’d been bitten by a rattler, heart pounding. I had to work. Technical writing was my livelihood. So, I took a deep breath and tried again. An hour later, I was huddled on the cold tile in the back restroom stall at work, sobbing as my forearms and hands throbbed. My palms pulsed cherry-red, agony needling my fingers and wrists. That afternoon, I went to my doctor at Kaiser, who confirmed my fears.
I was totally disabled with repetitive stress injuries. Both hands.
I’d recently moved to Los Angeles after completing a film mentorship with the famous horror novelist and filmmaker, Clive Barker. Little did I know that his story “The Body Politic” would be so prophetic. In that tale, Charlie George’s hands start a revolution to free hands from their owners. Right – the New Messiah – finds a kitchen knife and severs Left so he can run off and spread the Gospel of Freedom. Soon, hands everywhere follow, faithful disciples killing their owners and searching for Right to lead them to the next phase of the digital uprising.
When I emerged from the restroom that morning, I found abundant evidence that my coworkers were about to suffer the same fate: wrist braces, lumpy rubber wrist rests, the pungent scent of Tiger Balm. The revolution had begun. I was the first to fall.
I found disability to be a strange, noisy beast as chronic pain trumpeted in my ear day and night. I could no longer do basic things like open jars, prepare meals, or scrub floors, much less do the one thing my soul needed: to write.
My mother called repeatedly – not to ask about my injury, but to ask if I’d agree to be caregiver for my severely disabled sister if anything happened to them, our parents.
“Mom, I’m disabled myself,” I explained.
“Oh, you’re not really disabled,” she said. “It’s just your hands, isn’t it?”
Something inside of me shattered. I hung up.
The Worker’s Compensation insurance adjustor approved for me to be treated by a chiropractor that a friend had recommended. But after a month of treatment, my hands felt worse. When I told my chiropractor, he smiled shark-like as he purred, “Sorry to hear that.” He then filed a report declaring me “permanent and stationary” – that is, I couldn’t get better.
My Worker’s Comp payments abruptly stopped.
The adjuster pressured me to have carpal tunnel surgery. I explained that I didn’t think we’d given noninvasive therapies a proper chance. My doctor at Kaiser had said it took months to treat injuries like this. “Well,” he said, “if you want your payments to restart, you’ll have to go to an Independent Medical Examination.”
It was a lie. And he knew it.
I went to the exam, trusting that this new doctor would see how hurt I was and restart my care. But he, too, declared I was permanently disabled. Now I could no longer see a doctor. I put almost everything on credit cards. My debt ballooned quickly. I stopped paying for my private health insurance. But before I did, I went one last time to my doctor at Kaiser. “You need an attorney,” she said. “I know a good one.”
Out of options, I took his name and number.
#
“The Body Politic” wasn’t the first tale with a handless protagonist. The Brothers Grimm recorded a fairy tale called “The Handless Maiden.” In it, a young woman loses her hands to her father’s ax when he makes a deal with the Devil for all the wealth in the world. Handless, she leaves home and wanders into the underworld, where she meets a king. He approaches her and asks, “Are you a ghost or are you human?”
“I am human,” she replies, “yet I must live as a ghost, forsaken by all.”
Amazed by her beauty and strength, the king says, “They in the world above might forsake you, but I never will.” He falls in love with her and makes her silver hands.
My own silver hands materialized when I discovered voice recognition software. I used scarce resources to buy a copy. Version 1.0. It took extraordinary patience to learn how to use the software and to train it to obey my voice. But as soon as I donned my silver hands, the stories that had been flooding my heart since the day my hands rebelled poured onto the computer monitor like a hail of salamanders and a blizzard of butterflies…
#
I felt as though I was going to see The Great and Powerful Oz as I entered the austere legal offices. The attorney my doctor had recommended was young, darkly handsome, and smart. He told me I shouldn’t have gone to the Independent Medical Examination without representation. I was now in a very difficult legal position.
I sobbed, body-torn and hope-broken.
He melted. “Look, angel,” he said, “I’ll do my best to help. But I can’t make any promises.” He’d only be paid if I received a settlement. Drying my tears, I agreed and we got started.
With my silver hands, I wrote numerous short stories, scripts, and what would later be an award-nominated collection of poems. I became my own Scheherazade as one magical telling after another kept my soul alive. The technology improved my writing. It taught me to slow down, to craft with my voice as well as my thoughts. To reach down deep inside, to rummage around in my heart and there grasp the words before they could slip onto the page, unripe and pale with half-truth.
Meanwhile, like the narrator in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Fight Club, I paid off one credit card with another, back and forth as the debt grew.
In November 1997, my computer died. I had no income. No pain relief. And now no silver hands. I collapsed on the floor of my apartment, tears soaking the scratchy carpet as depression pounded into my chest like a railroad spike. Shadows swam behind my eyes as I stared at a stack of story printouts. The ouroboros of pain and depression has since been well documented, but at that time I was unaware of this dangerous cycle. I let the phone ring off the hook as I contemplated burning my stories and taking my life.
Now I was done.
I don’t know why I finally picked up the phone, but my friend on the other end was hysterical with worry. She coaxed me off the floor, urged me to eat and to take the computer to the electronics store for repair. Within a week, I was back to writing.
That was when I wrote the opening lines of my award-winning novel, Mr. Wicker.
In Grimm’s fairy tale, the maiden’s hands grow back. Mine did, too. After I spent a year on disability, I put myself back to work despite the pain because I was tired of being poor. When I told my attorney, he arranged for me to see a new doctor. I chose a chiropractor who used a combination of adjustments, TENS unit therapy, and moist heat. Those modalities combined with close attention to my ergonomics restored me to health. I could once again work and lead a normal life, albeit in ruinous debt. I chipped away at it each month. By 2005, over eight years after I was initially declared disabled, my attorney secured a settlement that helped me pay off what remained of my credit cards.
I was finally free. Or so I thought.
December 2012
Clive Barker’s “The Body Politic” better predicted my long-term outcome than any fairy tale. My hands ran away again several years later when I was working as a senior copywriter at another organization. They’d failed to give me ergonomic equipment that I’d requested repeatedly, and my body quickly suffered.
This time, something different happened.
Desperate to keep swimming in the rising tide of panic, I installed a second-rate version of the silver hands on my personal MacBook and brought it to work. A brief demonstration of the technology to the office manager convinced her to have IT install the full version on my work PC and let me continue working. By chance, I had my own office. Behind a closed door, I could write without being self-conscious. I was protected from ambient office noise that would affect the microphone, and my voice wouldn’t distract my coworkers.
An unimaginable nightmare was brewing. The Executive Director slithered up to my desk that first week and hissed, “You’re not supposed to have an office to yourself!”
“Do you know what’s going on here?” I asked. His face registered confusion. “I’m injured,” I continued. “I need this office to use accessibility equipment, at least for a little while.” At that, he fled without a word.
His callousness stung.
The Worker’s Compensation system played out at a glacial pace. I continued working for another year in that office using my silver hands. I was incredibly prolific. In fact, the pressure to over-perform was crushing because I felt I had to prove I was worth keeping despite being “broken.” I became the most requested writer, working on prestigious projects for top leadership.
Eventually, my surgeon said I had to go on leave for my surgeries. He didn’t trust me not to use my hands at work, where I was susceptible to deadlines and expectations.
And he wasn’t just any surgeon. As if the universe were making up for the horrors of my first experience, this time I had one of the nation’s top hand specialists. After two years of red tape, he performed laparoscopic carpal tunnel surgeries for both hands. That and the physical therapy eliminated the pain, numbness, and tingling. I was restored to perfect health once more.
During that time on disability, I remained productive in my personal writing thanks to my silver hands. Running a dated version of Windows via VMWare, I installed the silver hands on my MacBook. The peace and privacy of my home allowed me to write what would become another award-winning novel and even more short stories. I also sold the novel I’d written years earlier — Mr. Wicker — using my silver hands to incorporate notes from my editor. I completed all promotional pieces with my silver hands, as well.
With my regained health, I returned to work two years later, triumphant over my disability. I was a walking, typing success story.
But as I walked into the office, my former colleagues turned away when I greeted them, silent. People I’d worked with closely on high-profile projects now wouldn’t even look at me, much less speak to me. What had happened (or more likely was said) in my absence? The icy reception crushed me. As I reeled, human resources called me into a meeting where they informed me that I was no longer “qualified” for my old job. Instead, I was given a new one for which I was far less qualified. I embraced it as an opportunity to learn a new skill, maybe increase my value on the market. It didn’t help. Being stigmatized and ejected from my profession left me too deeply traumatized.
I am human, yet I must live as a ghost, forsaken by all.
The emotional trauma continued as I experienced ableism for the first time in my life. Human resources attempted to install the silver hands on my work computer, which was no longer in an enclosed office but rather in an open, relatively quiet area, surrounded by other desks. They claimed that legally they had to install the software in order to “accommodate” me. I wrote to the head of human resources explaining how they took for granted the privacy in their mind when they typed. I no longer had that privacy if I used voice technology in an open environment. Everyone would be able to hear my emails, my mistakes, my revisions. I would be too self-conscious to perform. Plus, I’d have to bear the animosity of my annoyed colleagues. Therefore, merely installing the software on my computer was not a complete accommodation.
When they insisted, I bitterly surrendered my workstation to an IT employee as she installed software I would never use. Software someone else surely needed.
Human resources next informed me that they were going to reduce my salary by the small percentage of disability I’d been granted in the final Worker’s Compensation report. It was not just illegal but also humiliating. Even with therapy, my mental health was crumbling. Rather than suffer through years of lawsuits over the hostile work environment and retaliation for disability, I took a Worker’s Compensation settlement and quit.
Shortly after, the division I worked in was hit by ransomware, which cut off everyone from their computers and voice-over-IP phones for months. Highly sensitive information was at risk. In a division-wide meeting, leadership told their employees, “We’re fucked.”
I won’t lie. Scheherazade indulged in a bit of schadenfreude when she heard what happened.
#
The keyboardist of Emerson, Lake and Palmer had killed himself because he was disabled by repetitive stress injuries. I know that piercing sense of helplessness and fear. The feeling that life has been torn away. Emerson’s girlfriend, Mari Kawaguchi, told Billboard magazine that Emerson had suffered from cruel comments online about his playing, especially after surgery on his right arm. To not be able to do the one thing that he loved — to play music — must have been unbearable. No doubt the combination of online cruelty, physical pain, and despair brought him to the same place I’ve been twice now, just with a different outcome.
My silver hands are still keeping me alive. During flare-ups, they keep me writing, working, eating, dreaming. Growing. Knowing that, while they in the world above might forsake me, my silver hands never will.
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About the Author
Maria Alexander is a multiple Bram Stoker Award® winner and Anthony Award nominee who has been publishing fiction and personal essays since 1999. In 2014, Library Journal gave her first novel, Mr. Wicker, a starred review and named it Debut of the Month. And in 2020, Halfire Entertainment optioned Maria’s award-winning YA horror trilogy for film. Maria lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two ungrateful cats, and an apple tree named Penelope.