5/29/2021 ~ I’ve had a picture of bending fingernails related to COPD on my site for a long time because Hippocrates first took note of them, thus giving centuries of credence to my pages about fingernails revealing health warnings.
It was all theoretical until I had severe symptoms of COPD and saw my fingernails beginning to bend. Rest reduced the symptoms dramatically, but not the bending. However, with the worrying symptoms gone I relegated my bending nails to the back burner, looking at them only a few times a year. It was reassuring that they weren’t getting worse.
It occurred to me that perhaps the bending could be unbent. After all, it was the beginning of bending, so perhaps it wasn’t particularly deep set. With that in mind I began doing minimal exercises and eating chicken instead of being entirely vegetarian.
Then stress mounted. While I’ve lived with a lot of stress for decades, every so often the stress peaks and gives my health a thrashing. The worst of it seems to be when something I’ve counted on suddenly switches from the Good Things column to the Bad Things column.
I think it’s like Chris Zeeman’s Catastrophe Theory, where the balance of things is upset by something that would otherwise be quite minor. Chris Zeeman was John in London’s mentor professor at Kings College, Cambridge, and I talked to him once on the phone. He seemed a lovely man.
The catastrophe that made me out of breath walking from one room to another in my apartment was my Good Column Dell computer leaping into the Bad Column, with my purchase of an XPS15 9500 as a replacement for my decidedly Good Column Dell Latitude Computer. The XPS had pages jumping out, jerky scrolling, and its cursor would freeze! Then, in defiance of everything I believe about computers, the XPS refused to shut off when I pressed on the power button.
Dells techs blamed the jumping pages on me, saying I was putting the cursor on the start page. Thing is, the start page wasn’t visible when I played Plants vs Zombies and pages jumped open. The best the techs would do was concede I was doing it by accident. They did NOT help. Apparently, in their defense, they didn’t know about touchpad gestures: every time my fingers rested on the touchpad I signaled the start page to open, but I didn’t know that, and apparently the techs hadn’t been taught that, so they took to accelerated criticism of me for being critical of them. I started getting phone calls, over and over, that said rather tauntingly, “Byeeeee” when I answered. The techs also appeared to be making Karen jokes about me. Sigh. And, sadness.
After I wrote a letter complaining, Dell Corporate joined the techs, and stopped the senior tech who was finally helping me from continuing to help. That left me in the lurch when I had to do an Appeals document re the foreclosure of my home in which Wells Fargo was allowed to use false affidavits.
The stress was so intense I could barely get out of bed. My ankles were huge, indicating my heart was having difficulty. And I was major depressed.
After a week in bed, doing nothing, the swelling went away and I felt better. I began to wonder if there had been any change to my nails before the stress had cut short my dancing exercise. Before the major stress I had wondered if the fingernail ridges that play a part in bending would grow out and the bending would resolve into nice smooth nails, but with all the additional stress… What was going on, I wondered.
Yesterday, 5/28/21, I finally took pictures of my nails to see if the ridges were growing out from my dancing exercise to You Can Call Me Al, and eating chicken.
Sure enough, the thick ridges were growing out.
In the above picture you can’t see the split at the top of a thick ridge on my middle fingernail. For more about how fingernails split at the top of ridges, see the page, Redness Under Nails.
The following picture of my middle finger’s nail shows the split.
While it’s no fun to see the hideousness of my ridges captured in photographs, it’s exciting to know that minimal exercise was, in fact, reducing the ridges… which would indicate that my heart problems were being simultaneously reduced. Once the ridges were gone, the nails would no longer bend given that the bend happens between entrenched ridges. But there’s the problem of stress… there’s just so much stress and it completely sets healing back.