Friday 27 February 2009

Pic of the day: I know if I mention being sick, someone is bound to worry. But unless I never post again, I probably survived. I am writing this night to March 1, so at least I survived that long.

Sick

I've been sick and tired the last couple days. I think the sick comes first. The sleep problem follows from there: After a few hours of sleep, I wake up because my bronchies are running full with goo. They make that creepy rasping / bubbling sound that makes me think "dying breath". Eww. Coughing deeply will help for a while, but then it comes back, so I sleep fewer hours as well as with poorer quality. This probably does nothing to help my health again.

At work yesterday was particularly strange. I think this was (at least mostly) because I was sick and tired, rather than my dabbling in brainwave modification through technology. Anyway, it was as if the short-term memory of my senses was disabled. When I closed my eyes, the visible world ceased to exist. Of course it always does, but usually you retain some fairly detailed image for a while afterwards - you can probably point in the general direction of things or at least say that they were there. Not so this time. It was gone. More than that: When I moved my eyes, the rest of the surroundings that I did not focus on would also fade away, just not completely. This is also predicted by science: We all have tunnel vision actually, but we maintain an illusion that we are seeing everything in detail, because our eyes sweep over the whole field of view (in a somewhat chaotic manner) and we retain a detailed memory of what we saw even after we move our eyes.

It was a pretty weird experience, kind of like strobelight or tunnel vision or some combination of those. When I came home, my body temperature was also slightly higher than usual - not a full fever, just one degree Celsius above normal. It fell toward normal levels during the evening though, so I went to work today. The world was more continuous this time, but I coughed a lot. I am still not sure it was a smart thing to do, to go there. But this is my favorite time of the year to work, since we have lots of easy work.

My bronchies are still clogging up, and my throat is sore, but I don't have fever. I am not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing - it seems like the body does not really take the threat very seriously. But then again, I may take things more seriously than they are.