Entering her senior year at the renowned Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio in September 2001, Akiko Trush remembers furiously practicing a concerto by the late Russian pianist Dmitri Shostakovich when she noticed something was “off.”
“There was this octave passage that I was trying to master without making a mistake,” the 45-year-old pianist and piano teacher recalls. “I had been able to play it well before but, suddenly, I lost the grip on my right hand. At first I thought, ‘Oh, what just happened?’’’
Trush attempted the passage again, but the muscle contractions soon spread from the thumb on her right hand to her whole hand, then up her right arm and into her shoulder. After a week, her right thumb would instinctively curl into her palm when she tried to place her hands on the piano keys.
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