I've taken the day off work. Instead of being plagued by things that go bump in the night, I've been visited by a demon of another kind: painsomnia.
It's beyond frustrating when you suffer from chronic fatigue but sleep is elusive and is unfulfilling when it is eventually caught.
It got particularly bad on Friday. It took me a long time to get to sleep on the Thursday night and for reasons unknown I pinged awake at 3:45am and after much tossing and turning, gave it up as a bad job since I was due to start work at 6:30 anyway.
I had a good day though with some unprompted positive feedback about some work I had done, continuing with a long needed project of clearing out the closet, and then had a pleasant film night with my husband.
I was foolishly optimistic that because of my lack of sleep the night before, that I would sleep better that night. Ha!
By 4am, so 24 hours of being awake, I fell into a very reluctant and fitful sleep. Lots of strange dreams and fractured bouts of waking.
Of course, by the time I wanted to be up and about to essentially not waste the weekend, my body felt like it was a dead weight. I don't think it was promising me some decent sleep with these antics, it felt more like mockery. I half expected Jim Bowen from Bullseye to pop up to tell me what I could have won.
I managed to have a nice day in spite of it, more out of a stubbornness to not let it ruin my weekend, but I felt exhausted and fed up underneath it all.
Surely, I would be so exhausted after two nights of particularly shoddy sleep that I would be given a break. Ha!
I got to sleep around 2am after much tossing and turning. It was brief. By 4am I had given up so instead of winding myself up by more pointless tossing and turning and failing to get comfortable (thanks Henning), I got up, made a cup of tea, got some brioche, and curled up on the sofa to have a cry watching The Repair Shop.
I think I managed to have a snooze on the sofa for about an hour but that probably just made me feel worse.
One of the side effects of lack of sleep, is an increase in my tinnitus. It's perfect of course that one of the things I get punished with because of lack of sleep is brain buzzing and ear ringing.
I had plans to do a dress rehearsal of my Hallowe’en costume yesterday but I had neither the energy or motivation for it and I wasn't going to put unnecessary pressure on myself so I decided to put it off until later in the week.
I dozed off on the sofa until around 9pm. My husband tells me I was like that for a couple of hours. I was completely out of it though and he helped me upstairs to bed where I thankfully slept.
I still had strange dreams and woke up a few times but the key difference was that I managed to get back to sleep.
By the time my alarm went off for work, my body was like, hey, this sleep malarkey is quite good isn't it, I think we should have more!
I logged onto work briefly to let some managers and team members know and then stayed in bed a bit longer.
The tinnitus is still being annoying and the increase in codeine I've been taking over the last few days means unfortunate digestive implications, but it's the lack of sleep that makes me feel crazy.
I'm grateful to have finally had a half decent block of sleep, that's a good sign.
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