Carpal Tunnel
When I finished hacking away on Roller this past Saturday, my fingers hurt from typing so much. Who knows why, I didn't add that much code. Must've been all the keystrokes to run Ant, start Tomcat, and test stuff. Yeah, we need more tests - but those won't help tweak CSS. Yesterday, all I did was review Hibernate in Action, so no coding, but a fair amount of typing. By the time I went on a bike ride yesterday afternoon - my left hand's left-most fingers were curled up naturally and my forearm was aching. Carpal Tunnel has set in quite nicely in my left forearm. I can still type, as evidenced by this post - but it definitely hurts and it seems like I could do some serious damage if I keep it up.
Herein lies the problem. I took this week off from my regular gig to concentrate on the Spring book. So I need to be typing like a madman all week - but my body is not cooperating. Rather, it's trying to tell me something - "you're not cut out for this this much coding/typing." So what should I do? I've had these same symptoms before - and when I did, I got a massage and took a couple of days off. That's a bit difficult this week with my livelihood depending on a pain-free left arm/wrist/fingers. I've booked a 10:00 massage - let's hope that gets me through the week. I definitely need a longer-term solution though. It'd be nice to write this book w/o typing, just talking.
Related: Carpal Tunnel in March 2006.