Is anyone out there getting enough sleep? I want to thank everyone for sending along sleep remedies, drug tips, meditation cds, yoga poses, and other great ideas for catching a good night's sleep: the time-tested warm glass of milk at bedtime, lavender-infused sheets, sun salutations, thankfulness meditations, accupressure points, etc. Just yesterday, a friend dropped off a Central American rainforest remedy for sleeplessness, general anxiety, etc. With that, I've been using the tinctures that the anthrosophic doc gave me, listening to some meditation cds, and trying to do some yoga before climbing into my bed, where I listen to Dominick reading Harry Potter aloud, with all the British accents, while we both bathe in my blue moonlight. I'm trying not to eat anything after 7, trying to get more fresh air and sunshine and exercise during the day, trying not to over-stimulate myself at night by writing my blog (oops). I appreciate all the suggestions, and as of two nights ago, was sleeping better. Last night, I took the Tylenol with codeine for my cough, and was hoping to cough less and sleep more than the previous night. No such luck.
This morning: I had a similar reaction to the codeine that I had to the Ativan I tried a couple of weeks ago: while my body was completely zonked out, my head was wired, and anxiety befell me early and often. I think I fell asleep at about 4 am, woke up at 8. (Oh! I slept in!) Maybe pharmeceuticals aren't working for me. I am a bit of a wreck this morning, will be useless at algebra for certain. Perhaps I should stick to the natural remedies...and in the meantime, will bask in all that good ju-ju you are all sending my way, and try again tonight.
I wrote the following morning pages on Monday morning, before I was to head to Faulkner Hospital to meet with Dr. Eleanor Pitts, the plastic surgeon who is scheduled to do my reconstruction after mastectomy on Monday, the 17th at Newton-Wellesley Hospital.
It's very annoying; if I awake early, as I've done this morning, my head often starts to organize and compose thoughts, dreams, blog posts--and it feels very unfair, because my hands cannot yet write it all down, and I lie there, my head spinning tales and yarns that collect on the floor in a heap.
When I was in college, I slept all the time--except, of course, when I wasn't sleeping at all. I often would sleep into early afternoon, turning back into sleep over and over again, to re-position and recast myself in bed and in dreams, epics of master proportions, complete with digressions and tragic heroes. Sometimes, I’d be catching up for a severe lack of sleep, a shortage brought on by all that late-night, er, studying. But it was fairly guaranteed that I would sleep in no matter what. I think I might have eaten breakfast at college only a handful of times, and all of them were mornings when I just hadn’t seemed to have gone to sleep yet.
Somehow, though, I must have used all my sleeping-in chits—because I really haven’t been able –even when allowed—to sleep in much since college, and especially not since having kids. Of course, that’s pretty typical for anyone and everyone who has babies or young gremlins in the house; we all know that if you like to sleep in, you’ll be blessed with early risers, who awake with the sun and rush out with much fanfare and trumpets to greet the morning. Luke was like that. We were lucky, though. There was a great babysitter named Elmo who visited our living room from 6 to 7 every morning, and he and Luke got along famously, giving us an extra hour to more fully wake up. Dominick is still like that. He’s about seven years past Elmo, but still enjoys the promise and quiet of the early morning hours.
Once you’ve had kids, sleeping in takes on a truly different meaning than it did in college. If I sleep past seven, I’ve “slept in.” If I sleep past eight, and I think this has happened maybe four times in the last thirteen years, I wake up feeling as if I’ve missed all my classes that day. Hurrah!
Even with the help from Daylight Savings, I couldn’t sleep in this morning. How pathetic! And of course, I had some trouble falling asleep at the usual 10 o’clock hour, since it was really only 9. So when I awoke—for good—the distant buzz of early morning traffic on 91 humming in my ears, and the glow around the curtains starting to seep into my sleepy eyes—it was only 6:30, new time. 5:30, old time? Not good! Daylight Savings demands that you play around with time, to make it actually work for you, rose-tinted world and all, so I told myself I had actually slept from 9 to 6:30. In my head, I put old time and new time together, and rejoiced in my—however artificially contrived—good night’s sleep.
I’m sure I’ll feel it later in the day.
When I was in junior high school, I tried to fall asleep promptly at 10:00 every night—after I had exhausted two hours of sitcoms like Mork and Mindy and Laverne and Shirley—because I knew that if I didn’t, I’d be super tired at 6 the next morning, when my clock radio, set to WRKO, Boston—would wake me up with its usual diatribe of banter and AM hits. I believe in miracles, you sexy thing, you sexy thing, you… I had to leave the house by about 6:45 in order to make it to school, which was about a mile away, by a little after 7. And I had to fight for the bathroom with my older sister, spend quite a long time blow drying my hair, and eat a good breakfast besides—before heading out along the sidewalks and inner alleyways of downtown Andover. I actually loved walking to and from school, especially by myself. I loved taking in the morning bustle—people heading off to work, merchants readying their shops and cafes for the morning rush, trucks making deliveries. There was something fresh and new about every morning, something I could only be a part of if I was out and about in it. It was in the air—smells, sights, and sounds that would stay with for the rest of the day. (I miss that, living where we live.)
Bedtime was different. Bedtime cast a heavy darkness on the lightness I felt during the day and transported me to a place of worry, worry, worry (oh gee, it still does--is this my second adolescence? this transitioning to a new stage of my life, soon to be helped along by Tamoxifen, somehow kicking up all those adolescent hormones and anxieties?). I remember feeling so anxious about getting to sleep, about the need to fall asleep by 10, 10 at the latest. This was not enforced by my mother, but by me, by my internal hand-wringer. Some nights, if I was feeling particularly wakeful, and sleep had failed to whisk me away, I’d work myself into a knot of anxiety and I’d lie there for what seemed like hours, unable to ease into sleep of any kind.
It was different by the time I started at Exeter as a 14 year old tenth grader. Lights out at 10:30 my first year and a host of other structures suited me well at first, when I was still eager to comply, wearing plaid skirts to class, shutting myself in my room during study hours to obsess over my work. Then I met Rachel. We switched into a double together, and began an epoch of late-night (actually, we were at it 24/7) mischief. Soon the workload alone required me to stay up late, and often all night long, so being able to go to sleep at all, no matter what the hour might have been, became a coveted prize. I learned quickly that standing on my head in the morning after pulling an all-nighter brought back some of the color to my face and became part of my morning routine, my tai chi, before classes.
In college, I did more passing out than falling asleep. But that’s another story.
When you’re nursing babies, you sleep whenever you can, no matter what the time of day or night. You regulate your sleep after your baby’s; otherwise, you’d get none. What’s nice is that you have built-in help, that wonderful “let-down” reflex that happens when your milk comes in, sending you and your baby into a little hammock of nirvana heaven (is that redundant?). It’s a little like the twilight meds they give you for surgery. Pretty great.
These days, my misspent youth firmly behind me, and my childbearing days seriously and quite literally numbered, a good night’s sleep still eludes me. The kids don’t usually wake me up anymore (Luke has begun his sleeping-in stage, and Dominick waits, graciously, until he knows I’m up before coming in to snuggle and watch the morning news), and the dog is too joint-crackly to make it up the stairs all too often (but a thunderstorm will send her scurrying to me in my bedroom, and I’ll hear the high-heeled click of her nails on the wood floors and the whoosh of her tail as she finds me, suddenly wet from her nuzzle), but somehow—when it is quiet in the house—I still can’t sleep in.
And these days, the cancer--the fatigue from the endless doc visits, the stress of worrying, being out of rhythm, trying to process so much information and emotions at once--keeps me up like a newborn baby. I’m sure for Luke, some of this feels as if there is a new baby in the house, and his name is Cancer. Truth is, it has taken me away from them more than any of us would like—and it’s been hard on the boys. In some ways, baby metaphor aside, since there’s nothing, really, about this cancer that brings about that utter joyfulness that babies bring, it feels instead like a new, full time job—the crash course in all things breast cancer, wrangling with cranky receptionists on the phone, going to doctor’s appointments, making arrangements for kid coverage, researching docs and treatment, processing the emotions, keeping friends and family updated, reassuring the boys, making the switch from doing everything for everyone to letting others do things for me, getting well…
Thankfully, I don’t work in a windowless cubby, or have to wear panty house every day (or any days, yuck). And I work for myself, so my boss is, for the most part, pretty cool (except when she tells me that I haven’t done enough, or sends me off to get her fortieth cup of green tea, jay-sus. Lazy bittie-ch.)
I am lucky that they can cut the cancer out—that it is “curable” in this way. A friend just lost her father to lung cancer. He wasn’t well enough for the docs to “cut it out” of him; he was older, as fathers often are, and wasn’t able to choose amongst treatment options the way I am.
L-U-C-K-Y in many ways, I am. I don’t have to worry about losing my job because of this (although I’m preparing for the need for substitute teachers and guest lectures, at home and afar, with Skype), I don’t have to worry about whether this will devastate us financially (this will make a mere dent; though with gas prices so high, choosing to have the surgery in Boston will cost a bit more, but we were overdue for spending time in the big city, luxuriating in a high rise hotel, taking in some big hospital cult-ah…); I don’t have to worry about not having health insurance; and I don’t have to worry about getting the support my family and I will need.
Plus, I am young—relatively speaking, as my children like to point out (though I am older than my local surgeon, Dr. Fox, older than my breast surgeon, Dr. Specht, older than all the professional athletes everywhere--hang in there, Tim Wakefield!!)—I am healthy—also, relatively speaking, given the current color of my phlegm--and I am spirited and feisty (most of the time), a Used Bagge, for goodness sake, and an ex-fullback at that, ready to tackle all the bad guys if I have to. Bring ‘em down!!
Sleep or not, I am determined to move forward, one step at a time, with whatever it takes to come out on the other side healthy, happy and cancer-free. Silver linings abound; opportunities for growth and learning flourish. Now, if I can only find Mr. Sandman tonight, all will be well.
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