Some tools to make gardening with arthritis easier at your new Soquel home.
Many get arthritis, and it is generally believed that it is one of those afflictions that only affect old people. That is not the case, as the disease affects people of all ages, even juveniles. Arthritis is a disease that afflicts your joints and causes inflammation and swelling. Arthritis is the name given to an entire spectrum of joint-related conditions encompassing over 100 diseases. Rheumatoid arthritis ( RA) is the most common and most debilitating, as it is the major cause of joint damage in patients. Early treatment can alleviate the most damaging aspects of this disease of the joints. While there is no cure, progress is being made.You can learn more at Arthritis.org on treatments and things to make your life easier at home.
While some get rheumatoid arthritis later in life, many are younger women of child bearing age. Moving into a home is stressful enough. Looking at real estate is often a bit stressful. What is where, what is of value, do you want to live in a Soquel garden home, or an ocean view home or a small Capitola Jewel Box home? Stress plays a part in all of our lives, but to have to endure the continuing pain while unpacking and doing all the other things to get a house ready for occupancy, is painful and stressful. When moving you are doing a lot more lifting and packing than normal activities, which can be particularly painful. Try to have clearly defined ideas of what you want and need, and have an experienced agent help with getting you a home that works for your needs now, and in the future.
Once you have settled in and start to relax working in the garden, what you find as a pleasure when you begin, starts to be a chore. Kneeling is painful, so finding wheeled seat that you can roll around, or the soft foam mats help when you have to weed between plants, or do lower cutting and planting,is helpful. Some other things to look at are garden tools that have over sized handles and foam rubber grips. Big pruning shears, or smaller snips often now have grips that make this task a bit less painful.
If you are working around the house, you find things like the grabber too, sort of an extended hand to grab things off shelves, allows for more mobility and are usually available at hardware stores. Chores like opening a bottle of wine can be accomplished with one of the “jack rabbit” style puller or the free standing ones where you use a big lever handle to pull the cork out. There are also compressed air openers as well. Things like opening jars can be done with the old style lid openers that circle the lid or Craftsman makes a tool, located in the tool section, with a large handle and a rubber strap that works too. The Craftsman tool comes often in a set of 3, are rubber, and while designed for oil filters,but do a good job as well with different sizes of jars.
Moving into a new home means new bills and new checks to write and address. Big barrel pens help, but for some a good quality signature stamps make the chore a lot easier and more legible. Some mice for computers have a magnification feature that can make things easier to see, to reduce spelling errors and there is also software that is voice activated,Via Voice that can type for you. It is getting better, but still room for improvement. Look at some of the sites below for gardening tools to help you garden with less pain from arthritis. Some of the sites have great stuff for other areas of the house.
If you are looking for some products to help you, Assistivetech.net has some things that may work.Unfortunately the site does not have photos on their products.
Here are some companies that make tools you may find useful  www.oxo.com
Garden Pals-makes a wide array of garden products            www.gardenpals.com
The Xstream garden hose nozzle is a no grip style                    Xstream
Maybe the problem is one hand is good and you need a left handed tool
Sometimes changing nozzles is a pain-use a quick connect from Gilmour
Fiskars is a company that delights in cutting well, they also have garden tools that cut easier
Sometimes just opening the door is the hardest part of getting out, Leveron can make that easy and have some telescoping garden tools as well
Gregg Camp is a Seniors Real Estate Specialist( SRES) and writes on senior real estate matters as well as general real estate topics in Santa Cruz California and the surrounding Monterey Bay area.