I thought I had it all figured out. I thought I had it licked. I’d crested the hill of negative thought and was rolling hurriedly down the other side with a devil-may-care glint in my eye and a skip in my oxygen-enhanced step.
But as if to remind me that roller-coasters have downs as well as ups (are we all enjoying the mash-up of metaphors today?), life turns around and bites me on bee-hind like a snake interrupted in the middle of dinner. A really nasty snake that bites really badly and hurts a lot. Like a cobra. Not an adder.
Last night I toppled over into full-on insomniac territory. I managed a grand total of 90 minutes sleep, and for the pedants among you, it was from 5.30am-6.30am and from 6.45am-7.15am. I also managed a brief nap between 8.15am and 8.45am, which I don’t count as sleep as technically I’d already got up in the morning to do my drugs. Even counting the nap, that’s still a whopping 2 hours of sleep.
There are few things worse than lying in bed, waiting for sleep to envelope you, only to find that the Sandman appears to have left you off his rounds for the night, or made his house-call while you were in the bathroom brushing your teeth.
I would have been tossing and turning all night, had my NIV not insisted it was only going to work when I lay on my left side. That may have been a blessing, mind, because if I’d have been lying on my right hand side I’d have spent the night staring at K sleeping soundly all night next to me, which is bound to wind one up a little…
Today, then, has not really followed the pattern of yesterday, nor managed to continue the wave of optimistic advancement. It has passed, and is indeed still passing, in a fog, a mist, a veil of heavy-eyed melancholy as my mind has struggled to make sense of the simplest little thing going on in the world.
It took me so long to respond to K this morning that you’d have sworn her enquiry was more closely related to the implications of Chaos Theory when applied to Newton’s First Law rather than the desirability of a high-temperature, caffeine-enhanced morning beverage. In fact, I’mnot entirely certain I actually gave her an answer, but I got a cup of tea all the same.
I think it’s fair to say that nothing productive has come from my day so far today. I managed to get to Oxford to have my levels checked for my IV’s, and I managed (just about) to absorb the necessary information from my physio to operate my new NIV machine that they’ve given me, but beyond that, very little as actively passed through my brain and come out again in any semblance of comprehensible fashion.
I’m perfectly expecting to wake up tomorrow morning (oh to wake up – what a joy it would be, to be so far asleep as to be able to define oneself as actually waking up!) and read this back to myself and discover nothing more than a thrice-too-long stream of consciousness resembling more closely a collection of randomly-arranged letters than an essay understandable to students and natives of the English tongue.
If you’ve made it this far down today’s entry, I commend you. Personally, I think I’d have given up after paragraph 2, but I suppose there is something of the car crash in the nature of it that may have been appealing enough to endure an extra few mintues’ worth of reading to see if I may actually have lost the plot completely, or merely temporarily misplaced it.
Perhaps, after a night’s rest and – dare I say it – sleep, I will be able to look back on today and pick out the moments of levity that helped me through, but right now, I’m nodding off to daydreams of a bed made of such softness that its entirely possible to lose an entire person into the mattress without the merest hint showing to the outside world.
So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodnight.