Rebuilding fine motor skills (strategy 044)

When I wrote my post – A Healing Brain, I touched on something that still amazes me every day: the brain’s ability to rebuild itself. Neurogenesis and neuroplasticity might sound like big technical words, but really they boil down to this simple truth — a damaged brain can learn again, provided we keep nudging it in the right direction. That “retraining” is absolutely vital. If we don’t guide the brain towards good habits, it’ll quite happily settle into the bad ones instead.

Although most of my difficulties have been in my left leg, my left arm took a real hit as well. The strength went, and the coordination along with it. So I made a point of using that arm as much as possible for ordinary, everyday tasks. Back in hospital, my occupational therapist started me off almost immediately. There I was, still in bed, meal tray across my lap, practising the tiniest of movements. Picking up small objects, moving them, stacking them… it all felt incredibly basic, but it was the beginning of teaching my arm how to behave again.

Now, 15 months on, it still isn’t perfect — but I’ll be honest, my attention has mostly been on getting my legs working properly again. Even so, I’ve clocked up hours of practice with little exercises: lifting and stacking those rigid cuboid ketchup portions you get with hospital meals, or clipping tiny Christmas-card pegs around the rim of a paper cup, all with the weaker arm. I also spent time strengthening the muscles themselves by squeezing and reshaping therapy putty. Simple, repetitive, but quietly effective.

One of the more unusual tools I used was something from the Human Benchmark website — the “Aim Trainer”. It’s designed to test reaction time, but for me it became a brilliant fine-motor workout. Thirty little circles appear, one after another, in random spots on the screen, and the challenge is to touch them as quickly as possible. It sounds like a game (and to be fair, it is), but it was surprisingly powerful in coaxing my hand and arm back into sharper, more deliberate movements.

Little actions, done often. That’s really what this stage of recovery has been about