After two fitful nights of “sleep” (and I use that term very loosely), I finally was able to sleep long and hard last night. Thursday night I didn’t get to sleep until midnight, only to wake up at 4:30am to eat a small breakfast and begin the barium binge. Friday evening I was in extreme pain. Digesting the barium, unable to keep food or water down most of the morning and running to the bathroom every five minutes made for a very uncomfortable evening. I ended up taking my backup pain meds which always make me sort of loopy and for some reason that night it was moreso. I was hallucinating, feeling dizzy, groggy as all get out and unable to sustain a complete thought. I tried to just keep my mouth shut and my body still on the sofa so as not to alarm or worry Honey but when I eventually crawled up to bed, my body decided to mess itself up even more. For some reason I hurt my hips by sleeping on them wrong throughout the night. I also kept waking up every hour or so. Additionally, although I was freezing cold with socks, gloves and a robe on all night, I must’ve had a fever because I woke up to a soaked pillowcase. Yuck.

Through the past five months of My So-Called Chaos, I have learned a simple little trick to help cure insomnia: change the sheets. Even if they’ve just been changed two or three days prior, changing the sheets after a fitful night or two of tossing and turning can easily solve the problem. Just sliding your feet into that soft, tender tightness that is a crisp set of tucked-in sheets gives you the feeling of being hugged by the whole bed. So last night before bed, we changed the sheets and I slept so very very well!

I’ve always been a proponent for the importance of a good night’s sleep. I don’t know anybody besides myself who will actually call in sick or just late to work because “I didn’t get enough sleep last night.” If I don’t get at least 7 hours straight through (not including mini-awake-trips-to-the-potty), then I am a force to be reckoned with the next day. Honey is as picky about his sleep patterns as I am. Shortly after we started living together, I suffered from insomnia because, even though he’d fall asleep next to me in the blink of an eye, he’d STOP BREATHING for several seconds at a time. I’d be very close to the edge of peaceful, blissful sleep, only to wake myself up to the shock of him forgetting to inhale! Eventually, we got him into the doctor who put him through a rigorous sleep test and sent him home with a CPAP machine that keeps him breathing through the night. Before the CPAP, while he would seem to fall asleep at the drop of a hat, he would actually only get a total of about 90 minutes of restful sleep throughout the nights - which explained why he was falling asleep at work all the time, too!

So after the CPAP, we both sleep a lot better. A couple years ago we invested in a Tempurpedic beds and we absolutely love it! We have special pillows and it has taken us five years to finally agree on the right blanket/sheet combination to satisfy us both while also being aesthetically pleasing! Whew!

Since October, I’ve had more sleepless nights than good ones. I still take the Ambien nightly but sometimes it just doesn’t work. The first couple of nights after CAKE really make for some difficult nights and then later, of course, random things happen (pain, headache, fears, anxiety) to mess up my sleeps. So when I have a full 8+ hours of body-comfortable, dream-happy sleep, I am extremely grateful! I am totally recovered from Friday’s CAT scan and ready to tackle another week before more CAKE. Horray!