I first realised something was wrong with my hand last Thursday evening. I’d been invited by a friend to go shooting at his grouse moor in Yorkshire and the bedroom I’d been assigned had a stiff wooden door. After a hearty supper, I returned to my room and gave the door a shove with my shoulder to force it open. The next thing I knew I couldn’t move any of the fingers on my right hand.

The following morning it was no better. Pulling on my plus fours, tucking them into a pair of woollen socks and fastening the garter ties was a work of colossal administration. As for the buttons on my shirt, I gave up after ten minutes and just pulled my shooting sweater over the top. When I arrived on the moor it quickly became apparent that I was destined to shoot even fewer birds than usual. I was literally unable to pull the trigger.

I told the host about my problem and he recommended I go to A&E in Middlesbrough. I later learned that he and all the other guests assumed I’d had a stroke, which, needless to say, also occurred to me. I’m about to turn 60 and my mother died at 62 (although not of cardiovascular disease), so I’ve been having thoughts of mortality recently. Was this the beginning of a rapid decline?

Six hours later, I was eventually seen by a doctor, who also thought I’d had a stroke – although that did raise the question of why I’d had to wait so long following the initial triage. I congratulated myself on having stopped at Morrisons on the way to pick up some aspirin after remembering you were supposed to take them following a stroke.

The doctor prodded and poked my body to see if I’d lost any sensation on the right hand side. The combination of a bad hangover and acute anxiety made it difficult to tell, but I told her I didn’t think so.

To my immense relief, she diagnosed radial nerve injury. Among doctors, this is colloquially known as ‘Saturday night palsy’ because one of the most common causes is sleeping for too long in an awkward position as a result of inebriation. In my case, she thought I’d done the damage when I shouldered the door to my room open. She advised me to see an orthopaedic surgeon.

I returned to London that evening, which was a bit antisocial. But it wasn’t just the fact that I couldn’t shoot – I couldn’t use a knife and fork either. When I eventually got home at midnight, my son Freddie cooked me some sausages and then had to cut them up into small pieces so I could eat them. ‘And so it begins, Dad,’ he said, referring to the fact that it won’t be long before I need a carer to prepare all my meals. (The approaching 60th is a source of constant ribbing from my children.) I appreciated the gallows humour, and the injury was still new enough – and bizarre enough – to be a source of merriment. Another name for the condition is ‘wrist drop’ because it leaves you with a limp wrist. It’s as if I’m constantly auditioning for the part of Widow Twankey in the Lyric Hammersmith Christmas panto.

But as soon as I sat down at my desk and tried to reply to an email, the full measure of my disability became clear. Touch typing was out of the question. I had to resort to the hunt-and-hit method, using just my left hand. A two-line email that would normally take ten seconds took ten minutes. Given that I probably produce 10,000 words a day, this injury was completely debilitating. How was I to cope?

The answer, of course, is text-to-type, which is how I’m composing this column. But by God the technology has some distance to go. My iPhone struggles with words of more than three syllables, often breaking them down into two or three different words, so ‘gobbledygook’ becomes… well, gobbledygook. Even simple sentences get garbled thanks to autocorrect, with ‘earn a living’ becoming ‘own a Living Room’. And don’t get me started on the random capitalisation.

I’m trying to get Bupa to pay for a consultation with a private hand surgeon but I’m quickly discovering the vast range of things my policy doesn’t cover. If worst comes to worst, I’ll have to pick up the fee myself.

What choice do I have? It takes weeks to get an appointment with my GP and I need to fix this problem pronto. When people ask what I do for a living, I often struggle to answer. But the truth is, I’m basically a typist. Plus, I’ve been invited stalking in the Highlands next weekend so I need my trigger finger to be working. And I don’t think I can take Freddie with me to cut up my food.