Thumbs up?

I am useless with my phone. It's a beautiful white iPhone 4 (used) and it lives in a beat-up pink case. (Very cheerful.) I use it quite a bit ... to take photos of martinis at the restaurants Mr. L and I go to.

Okay, Mr. L took this one of me in a joint called O'Keefe's. (Hey, it was cold. I kept my jacket on.)

This one is from a place called the Jolly Roger.

Back to O'Keefe's.

At the Sunset Grill.

You get the drift. I even made a movie of my cat, Fred (but since have not been able to do it again. Damn).

The thing I really can't do well at all is text. My friend (and former Cozy Chick) Ellery Adams can text faster than the wind. She sends me a text and I painstakingly send her a short message, and then 4 paragraphs come back lickity-split. Oy. And now ... something has happened to my thumb and I will never be able to be a thumb texter. One day I woke up and not only didn't it work anymore, it wouldn't bend, either. According to my quack, it's arthritis.  I mean, she just blew it off.

Hey, I need that thumb. It does wonderful things for me. Like ... helps me to open jars and club soda bottles for my Happy Hour whiskey. It helps me pour milk into my tea cup(s). Going down steps it help to hold onto a railing. But ... not anymore. "Well, you could have surgery, but it probably wouldn't work." Thanks for being so cheerful, Doc. So the advice was "live with it. Oh, or you could take turmeric capsules.

So I ordered turmeric capsules, which just arrived yesterday. I took one so far. It hasn't done much (anything, really).

Luckily, I can still type. Hitting the keyboard's space bar is about all that poor thumb can do these days. And when I'm not typing, it lives in a splint, because otherwise Mr. L will be sitting in his office hearing, "YIPE" all day long when I move it to attempt to do things like seal an envelope full of bookmarks for readers, or stick tape on a package of yet more bookmarks for Cozy Chicks readers. Or even putting a CD in the player under the theory that I might actually write a couple of sentences on the WIP.

So. That's it. I have a useless right thumb. Anybody else got one? If so, how do you cope?