by Wm. David Waterman

Created on: January 10, 2009

I have tried writing when I was sick with the Flu that went around the area where I live. I can usually 'suck it up' and get the job done anyway. But when I fell off a roof and injured my back, the pain that I experienced during this time was often off the charts.

Writing while I am sick is not difficult if I remember to spell check and remember to check what I have written to verify I actually wrote what I thought I wrote. It seems the latter is the biggest problem I have. The distraction of my physical condition will definitely affect how clearly I am thinking. The more pain I am in the more I tend to drop sentences and lose thoughts before they actually make it to paper. This can get frustrating after the third or fourth occurrence in the same paragraph!

Having a back injury and being in constant pain for months with the accompanying issue of not being able to find a comfortable seating position, made for extremely difficult times. Pain is distracting. It is nagging. It is also costly. The time required to write an article and the need to go back constantly and double check the articles made for a very serious situation. Having to deal with the health problem broke the line of thought and ability to concentrate. Thus I took longer to write my articles. There was more than a few articles that I just scrapped during the worse episodes.

A medication that is being taken during illness and injury recovery will also affect a person's ability to concentrate. I was on several prescriptions for the injury including pain killers, which greatly influenced my ability to concentrate. A person that is on pain killers is warned not to drive or operate machinery and I have often wondered if it shouldn't apply to operating computer keyboards as well. I wrote one article for this site that I have left in my articles on Helium since it pays to remind myself that I should never take drugs and drive or take drugs and write. Keeps my feet on the ground if I go back and read what I wrote and how sloppy I was during the worse times.

I want to leave some encouragement here. It is the fact that after awhile one can exercise some control over the situation, and if that is done a writer can keep their wits about them long enough to finish and submit articles. So although I often would throw in the towel, I would come back to the table later and continue to write. Things that are written during the stressful situations in our lives will definitely be affected by the way we react to the problems in our life. The key is to remain in control of the illness or injury and not let it control you while you are writing. Admittedly this is hard to do. But it can be done and the troubles you go through while writing help define you the writer and impacts the work you do.

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