I’ve not been functioning at 100% for a couple of days now. It actually started Tuesday night with an ache near my right shoulder. I had a hot shower and went to bed, thinking it would pass, as such aches usually do. After 5 hours of trying to find a painless position to sleep in, 2.5 hours of sleep and 1 disastrous minute of noise outside it was clear the pain wasn’t going away.

Largely because of the trouble sleeping (even after trying ibuprofen, normally the painkiller that works best for me) I decided to ring up my doctor and make an appointment for Wednesday afternoon. His conclusion: it’s nothing serious, and it’s in the muscle which heals quicker than anything wrong with the shoulder joint. Advice: more painkillers before sleeping.

I took more painkillers Wednesday night, and it put something of a dent in the pain but not enough of one. Instead of just trying to find the right position I’d drop of for 15 or 20 minutes occasionally and then wake up again. When waking up around 01:00 after a 10 minute nap I suddenly felt very warm, around 01:03 my thermometer confirmed a fever.

The pain around the shoulder finally started to go down thursday evening, though it’s still not gone. Clichéd though it may be, it really does hurt when I laugh (the jerky shoulder movement does it). That allowed the painkillers to kill enough pain to let me sleep pretty well last night.

Currently I’m not feeling the shoulder too much, though it reminds me whenever I feel like laughing. But the fever is still there. I was actually battling some sort of minor virus before the shoulder happened and I’m guessing two bad nights took down my immune system enough for it to get through.

But what I really wanted to get to in this blog post is what the fever seems to be doing to me. I can still focus, almost to my normal level of concentration, but I find I have far less control over what I focus on.

I have of course been more tired than usual, from both the lack of sleep and the fever, which plays into concentration as well. Probably also plays into my ability to judge how well I’m concentrating. But still, though I haven’t been doing much of what I feel I ought to be doing I’ve done what I have been doing quite well.

The latest thing is a little php countdown script for NaNoWriMo 2007 I’ve added to the site here. It’s not advanced PHP by any stretch of the imagination, and large parts of it are actually just a re-used bash script I already had on Linux, but it was fun to do. It was also surprisingly easy to concentrate on, because it was what I felt like doing impulsively.

For some reason I can do a lot, even with a fever, as long as it’s following a natural impulse. It’s only when I try to force myself to focus that concentrating becomes like pulling teeth.

I actually remember another fever, some years back, which led me to set my then record for words written in a single day, somewhere around five or six thousand. That record is now at sixteen thousand, but it was another case of following an impulse with a fever. I guess that’s what they mean by working at a fevered pace.