I was told, around the time that I was first diagnosed Multiple Sclerosis, use it or lose it. Whilst that hasn’t always been the case as my illness has progressed, it is something that stuck with me. In an attempt to keep things moving, I have a few tricks up my sleeve.

For me, one important part of keeping things moving is to regularly exercise. I am unable to exercise with my legs, but my arms still have a go. My left arm and I have a complicated relationship. I’m still able to rotate my arm but the hand no longer has strength in to hold a weight so I just flap it about hoping that I move the right muscle groups and sincerely hoping that Super Sarah is nowhere near me! Depending on how the arm is behaving, we sometimes introduce resistance bands and so far I haven’t pinged it right back at Super Sarah. Winning!

I use a static hand bike to add some cardio to my exercise regime. I can cycle 5K in about 16 minutes which is very good – I can finish my cycle before an episode of Friends ends, my favourite show. To keep me motivated with cycling, I compete in many virtual challenges earning some fantastic medals. Who doesn’t love a medal? A little bit of bling to make sure that I exercise. In my entire body, I have one really big muscle in my right arm from the weightlifting and cycling on the hand bike and boy am I proud of this muscle!

Exercise aside, I have hobbies that I consider ‘hand physio’, I touched on this in previous post called Strong Right Hook. In other words, activities that I do to keep my right hand moving for as long as possible. Last year I discovered a love for diamond painting, something that I had never tried before but instantly loved. My right hand took to it very well, I expected some fights and for Super Sarah to be constantly picking diamonds up off the floor but this only happens every now and then. It is more hilarious when she has to rescue me from the sticky canvas that the diamonds go onto. It is seriously sticky and I am often found with both arms completely stuck as I tried to wriggle free. If nothing else it’s a great way to exfoliate! In all honesty, due to the heat this summer I have had to stop diamond painting as my arms are weakened, I miss it dearly and look forward to resuming my winter hobby.

Everyday, I complete word searches. Each year as a birthday gift Super Sarah gives me a subscription to a word search book. It is very exciting to receive a gift in the post each month! The great thing about word searches is that it is simply lines that I can continue to keep my right hand active and holding a pen. I am able to do word searches whether my arms are weak or strong and I tend to do at least six or seven per day. They keep me out of mischief and is surprising the general knowledge that I have picked up whilst scoring out those little words. For example, there are more types of celery than I even knew existed.

I remember as a kid on Christmas morning opening an activity pack with colouring in books, coloured pens and puzzle books. My favourite of these activities was a dot-to-dot. Now you can get grown-up ones that vary from 200 to 500 dots. Some of them are genuinely fantastic, works of art when you have completed them. I feel some childish glee, like it’s Christmas morning, when I start one. I used to be able to complete 500 dots in a day but this is more of a two-day job at the moment. But that’s just twice the fun, right?

Super Sarah and I have a guilty pleasure but it’s one that’s good for my hand so we indulge it. We love Lego! There, I said it and if you haven’t tried already, you really should. As a kid, my brother and I had a Lego set and we constantly bickered over the three sets of wheels. Who puts and odd number of wheels in a box of Lego? This was only going to lead the arguments! Thankfully Super Sarah and I are marginally more mature; marginally. We have some impressive sets from Saturn V rocket to Friends Central Perk (Friends Lego!) and those are just the ones that we have built. The sets are impressively engineered and clearly my dream job is now to be a Lego architect. Lego is a fantastic way to move your hands, or in my case, hand. They even have a tool to help you pick up and place bricks. I don’t know if this was created with dexterity in mind, but it really helps! Well, it significantly reduces the amount of Lego that Super Sarah has to retrieve from floor so that’s a bonus.

Drawing is now one of my favourite things to do. I loved drawing when I was younger but as I got older, life got in the way. It was a hobby that I had let go of and it wasn’t until I lost the use of my left hand that have realised how much I missed it. It has taken some time and patience to be able to make out what it is that I have drawn but my skills have developed with my non-dominant hand and I am proud of the drawings that I do.

With the exercises and various types of ‘hand physio’ that I do, my right hand is still going and hopefully for the long-term. The moral of my story is if you can move it keep doing it for as long as you can. I am really proud to have strong right arm and hand to hold an ice cream!