While I took some time out yesterday to write about some good old Legend of Zelda stuff in hope of buoying my mood, it only helped a little bit and most of that got undone by sleeping only four hours again. So, rather than get stuck in a negativity spiral, I’m going to write about what’s going on in a more informative than claiming manner. Or, I should say, I’m at least going to try that. Only the writing of this post will actually tell if I manage it, which is uncomfortably close to the process of going through physical therapy to fix my back problems. All you can do is try and see if it works out the way you want. The parallel is pretty apt, too, since I am a decent writer and am directing this blog post and my physical therapist seems to know what he’s doing, so he’s guiding my treatment in a direction that should help with what he believes to be nerve compression. It sounds pretty tame for what it is, to be honest. Or at least for what it feels like. From what I can gather (and I apparently only get to see my physical therapist on days I’m incredibly exhausted and barely coherent, so my understanding might be lacking), the short of it is that sleeping on my old, bad mattress trained my muscles a certain way and that muscle training means that I’m currently putting a bunch of pressure on the major nerves on the right side of my spine (since I went from sleeping in a bowl with a curve that stretched those muscles open to sleeping on a properly supportive surface that keeps my back level and “tightly” closes those muscles on my nerves for hours at a time). It’s sort of like constantly pressing on the nerve in your elbow–your funny bone–for hours until it becomes painful. I’ve been given some exercises to do to help strengthen and stretch my muscles while relieving the pressure they place on my nerves, which will hopefully be enough to eventually counteract the pressure I’m still putting on them.

From what my physical therapist has told me in some emails we exchanged after our first session (on a day I was a bit more coherent), recovery will be measured in weeks and it will not be a smooth journey. This could take a while, depending on how bad things are, and there’s no guarantee that there isn’t another problem that will also need to be solved. Plus, there is the complicating factor of going without adequate sleep for a month and a half now. One of the common side-effects of this kind of long-term sleep deprivation is increased nerve sensitivity and slowed physical recovery. So that, combined with the slower recovery and greater muscle and joint point from two of the medications I’m taking, means that I might be entering November still struggling to get a full night’s sleep. I will say that, coming up on two weeks in to physical therapy (a week and a half as of writing this), I’ve managed to get from about four hours of sleep a night to five or five and a half. This is a small change, but it’s enough that I’m no longer writing “don’t die” on my daily to-do lists (which I put on there solely to give myself a feeling of satisfaction for making it through another difficult day rather than because I need the instruction to stay alive). I am hoping that my ability to sleep consecutive hours will continue going up and that I won’t need to be drop-dead exhausted to get another six and a half hours of sleep like I did last Friday (the longest consecutive sleep I’ve had since August 24th). Hopefully I’ll continue recovering and can eventually get adequate sleep without some kind of assistance.

To that end, with my physical therapist’s begrudging blessing and my doctor’s uneasy approval (I saw her at the recommendation of my physical therapist and she isn’t concerned about any permanent damage yet, though I am supposed to schedule another visit in a couple more weeks if I haven’t seen sufficient improvement), I’ve started setting aside one day each weekend to put myself back to sleep with some kind of sleep aid after doing my physical therapy exercises following my first wakeup. What this looks like right now is hauling myself out of bed whenever I wake up Saturday morning, taking a dose of ZZZQuil, doing my PT exercises, and then crawling back into bed to get whatever additional sleep I can find under the smothering embrace of ZZZQuil. It usually isn’t much, another two or three hours, but that’s enough to get me a solid eight hours of sleep in a “night,” usually over the course of nine to ten hours. Sure, I spend most of the rest of the day in a bit of a ZQuil fog, but I usually feel better anyway, even if I still have trouble focusing. Physically, if nothing else, since I was able to let my body rest for a few more hours. I’ve only done it three times now and the third didn’t work as well as the previous two did, but then I was also dealing with a different and worse (and definitely much more temporary) back pain because I drove to Chicago and back on the same day. That took a lot more out of me, physically, than I expected. I’m still feeling it two days later and not just because I only managed to get about seven hours of sleep on my ZQuil day.

I will say that, thanks to the extra sleep, I’m having less trouble staying awake in most circumstances. I only dozed off once while I was at work today and I haven’t dozed off at all while writing this post. It probably helps that my back is starting to feel well enough that I can stand at my desk at work, even if only for a few hours over the course of my normal ten-hour days. I’m hoping that I’ll continue to see improvements and that each subsequent visit with my physical therapist will help me deal with whatever new pain has cropped up or figure out the next layer of improving my back’s health and muscular structure. I know I said it earlier, that I was essentially rebuilding my back from the bottom up, but I really didn’t expect to be this close to literally correct. The only thing keeping it from being literal is that we’re essentially working from the middle outward. I don’t think I’ve ever been as conscious of the muscles in my back and how much they get used in everything from assisting in the fractional movements of my arms when I’m typing and how they show up differently depending on my gait while I’m walking around. Or how my posture while sitting can put a surprising amount of pressure on them. It’s fascinating, learning to feel so much more of the inner workings of my body than I ever expected to and I can actually feel my heart beat or the blood pulsing through my veins when I focus the right way (biofeedback stuff in meditation was always an interest of mine, which kind of makes sense given that I learned to use meditation as a means of combating disassociation without realizing that was what I was doing, or that I was even disassociation in the first place).

The biggest upside to all of this right now is that at least it’s only about five minutes of exercising, assuming I can keep my focus, so it isn’t terribly time-consuming most days. I mean, sure, sleeping more is great, but I’ve kind of lost context for what it means to feel rested and relaxed, so it’s difficult to positively compare my current flavor of sleep deprivation to the old one when both are very bad, neither approaches anything that could be related to “pleasant,” and I don’t really have the mental focus to interrogate everything I’m feeling about this whole experience. Easier to just glide along and focus on the simple stuff, like putting in eye drops only once a day, finally, or making sure I take my various pills and vitamins at the right times in my day. That stuff is so much easier to deal with than putting words to my current emotional state.