[cancer] Sleep

May 07, 2012 05:20

Friday and Saturday nights, I slept 17.75 hours combined. That was after a 90 minute nap on the plane Friday, as well. I have a lot of friends who suffer from various forms of insomnia and who think I'm nuts to complain about sleeping too much, but trust me, oversleeping can be a real problem, too.

This is a post-chemo feature of Being Jay Lake. When I'm feeling in fairly good health and things are going well, I am almost back down to my six hours per night of sleep to be fully rested and energetic. A little more like six and half to seven a lot of nights, but not the end of the world. But if I have a bad night, or I'm up too late/up too early (as with most of my travel days), I continue exhausted and feeling under slept until I knock out a couple of long, hard nights of sleep.

Friday and Saturday nights of this past weekend were make-up sleep from last Monday's travel day.

Excuse me, but that's ridiculous. I mean, it is what it is, and I try very hard to respect my body's needs. But Saturday night I just couldn't go to bed when I wanted to. the_child needed my assistance on several projects, and the evening just ran long, long, long. So Sunday morning, I slept til 7 am, several hours later than I intended. That in turn robbed me of the time I'd planned to spend walking my two-hour loop, so I had to cut back to my ninety minute walk. Even then, I was running quite a bit later than planned, which rippled through my day, resulting ultimately in me being up later than planned Sunday night.

It feels like a frustrating waste of time, and makes it hard to plan my days and budget my available hours. I am a well-oiled schedule machine even on my loosest days. All this sleep is just a wrecking ball through the carefully crafted structure of that schedule.

Still, I sleep as much as I can when my body demands it. Anything else would be foolish. But, grr…

health, cancer, child, personal

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