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Hi All WordTwisters!
I thought I might add an unusual topic to our community. I was dx’ed with a stage IV cancer a bit more than a year ago. Since that time, I’ve been undergoing chemotherapy, in particular with a cocktail referred to as FOLFOX, which includes a platinum-based compound called oxaliplatin, which causes peripheral neuropathy in most patients. If you’re unfamiliar with neuropathy, it includes tingling starting in the tips of fingers and toes, with greater effects as time goes on and you get more of the chemo. It also causes a lack of appropriate sensation in the same areas, so the tingling plus lack of sensation is a double whammy for a WordTwist player (for example, I can’t feel the little bumps on my keyboard’s home keys whatsoever). In the worst cases (which I fortunately haven’t experienced yet), it can cause intensely painful pins and needles again in the same areas. Add to that the chemo and cancer brain fog, which worsens my typing accuracy and ability to quickly find words.
Anyway, I wondered how many members of the WordTwist community play with some disability or other limitations? I kind of figure that a *lot* of our members, maybe a majority play with a limitation, perhaps because mainly younger persons who don’t know the travails of getting older with maladies are spending their time doing something more active/extravagant that finding words out of a jumble of letters.
For those with limitations, do any of you have anything you do to help overcome them? If you have something new or emerging that reduces your typing or word-finding skill, have you just accepted that limitation, or perhaps you play less frequently with the thought that you just can’t perform like I used to?
I’ve been doing a little experiment to see how my performance has changed over time. On three occasions starting in May of this year, I’ve played 20 boards that each have had over 25 plays (which helps give a reasonable statistical idea of how an average player scores on that board). I then have tracked my scores against that average to get a multiplier on how I’ve done compared to that average player.
Side-story of an experiment I ran on myself
In May, well after when I had completed a first round of the FOLFOX and when my neuropathy symptoms had lessened somewhat, I did my first set of 20 plays. At that time, I averaged 1.55x the average board score. Two months later and without any additional oxaliplatin at that point, I completed and tracked another set of 20 plays and averaged an almost identical 1.56x the average player. This morning, with two recent doses of FOLFOX, and with the neuropathy coming on even prior to that first new dose (which is an effect many other oxaliplatin patients observe) I did my most recent set of boards and only averaged only 1.33x versus an average player.
So I’ve obviously slipped in my performance. I think I created one new high point score, but out of 20 boards with varying top scores, I only scored over 400 once - yikes for me.
End of side-bar
I may be a quiet member in terms of how often I read the forum, and worse yet in terms of posting, but I look forward to hearing from community members if you have some thoughts, questions, etc. :O)
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