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.
Continue readingInsomnia
The Weight of Sleep Deprivation
As of writing this, it has been about three months since I’ve felt well-rested. July of this year, coming off a vacation, started roughly since I was struggling to get my sleep schedule under control and, in a preview of the what would wind up being the entire month of September (and an unknown amount of October), had just returned from a vacation that was nice but not terribly restful since I kept having back pain due to the mattress I was sleeping on. The stress from that first week of July just picked up from there due to work deadlines and the amount of heavy labor I had to do to meet those deadline at my job. Plus, the back pain I had over my vacation faded a bit, but never entirely went away before it start slowly growing worse and worse until August started and I realized I needed to replace my mattress. It peaked two weeks later when I woke up with such severe lower back pain that I was afraid I’d permanently damaged my spine, prompting me to go out immediately in search of a new mattress. While I was able to reduce the severity of the pain I was dealing with by putting my futon mattress on top of my old, bad mattress, it didn’t really do much more than allow me to not feel like I was breaking my back by going to bed. Then, after an exhausting month of never enough sleep, I settled down for my first night on my new mattress and then started my birthday after barely six hours of sleep due to incredible and debilitating back pain. Since then, I’ve struggled to get even an average of five hours of sleep a night thanks to similar (but not the same) back pain that has shifted around my back over the entire month of September. Now, as October starts, my only hope for relief is the physical therapy appointment I have set up the day before this post goes up.
Continue readingFailing To Adjust To A New Mattress
I’ve fallen a bit behind on my blog post buffer. I’ve regained some ground thanks to a bit of a herculean effort on my part, but I’m still writing posts only a few days ahead of posting them right now and I’m not sure when I’m going to be able to start gaining enough ground to stay ahead. The problem isn’t a lack of post ideas or time to write but a lack of adequate rest. I have plenty of ideas, I just don’t have the energy, focus, or mental fortitude to write more than one blog post in a day and sometimes struggle to even do one. Best I’ve managed was two on last Friday and I barely managed that. Turns out that two weeks of terrible sleep following months of uneven sleep will really wear you down. I wrote about it a little bit for a post that went up last week, but things haven’t improved as much as I’d like in the two weeks I’ve been sleeping on my new mattress. I’m reasonably certain (intellectually, anyway) that this is just the pain of adjusting to a new, good mattress after years on a bad mattress that was starting to cause back problems, all slowed down because a medication I’m taking has negatively impact the ability for my muscles to rest, recover, and strengthen themselves. I’ve done enough research and figured a few things out (given that this experience is similar to ones I’ve had sleeping on other mattresses in the past) to know what is probably going on. Emotionally, though, I can’t really grasp that likelihood. I’m so exhausted from interrupted and poor sleep over these past two weeks that it’s all I can do to keep myself functioning at all. I almost had a minor breakdown over the weekend because of how tired I was due to how little I’d slept and how the various interruptions in my weekend meant that I couldn’t take a nap to make up for any lost sleep. It’s difficult to emotionally process things and to keep my emotions in check so I can handle them in a healthy and constructive matter when I’m this tired, but I’ve managed to hold on by a ragged finger this long and I THINK things are finally hitting a point where they’re starting to improve.
Continue readingThoughts About Post-Stress Crashing But For Back Pain And Getting Enough Sleep
I’m two days (and nights) into sleeping on a futon mattress on top of my old, severely dented mattress. This has been a learning experience that has left me not only a little loopy for reasons I’ll speculate on later, but that has me thinking about just how easy it might be to detect a pea beneath twenty mattresses, if those mattresses are thin, old, or scrungly enough. On one hand, I’ve learned that there are many types of back pain, some of which you might only feel as you slowly recover from worse pain. On the other hand, now I know what it means to climb into bed as an adult. And how my last partner felt every time we both stayed at my place. I mean, it’s not like my current pillow-topped mattress was particularly low (the perfect height for me to settle back on without needing to really bend at the knees, but now my bed surface is above waist-height on me (I’m six-foot-three, for reference) so I have to actually CLIMB onto it’s weirdly spongy surface. Sure, neither mattress feels like that on their own, but the weird way that pressure settles through the futon mattress into the foam-topped spring mattress beneath makes it all feel like an old, damp, slightly mildewy piece of memory foam that springs back instantly. It’s mildly upsetting to touch with my hands, but the sensation disappears once I’ve got most of myself into the bed, so I only have to put up with it for a few seconds at most as I clamber.
Continue readingSleeping On A Solution To My Years-Long Back Pain
I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this much, but I’ve begun to have increasingly bad back pain. It started a few years ago, during 2021 when I was struggling with insomnia, but I was able to fix that with some body pillows and some attention paid to how I positioned myself as I fell asleep. After all, it usually was worst when I’d wake in some kind of weird, twisted-up position and that needed a two-pronged approach to prevent. I didn’t think much more of it at the time since I’ve been having back pain of some kind my entire adult life, thanks to carrying all of my tension in my shoulders and neck, related tension migraines, bad posture at desk jobs and a tendency towards being given heavy labor due to my relatively large frame at non-desk jobs (or during periods of time when my desk job stops being a desk job). Treating those four things individually over the years always seemed to alleviate my problems, just like the more recent stuff in 2021 did. In the years since 2021, though, I’ve added a series of other little position and balance adjustment tricks to my bedtime routine, like getting the placement of my downward arm (I’m a side sleeper) just right on the bed and my upward arm wrapped around my body just right to maintain perfect balance in my shoulders. Or getting a stuffed Kirby shaped just like a pillow to stick to one side of my actual pillows so they’d stop moving away from me if I shifted positions a bit while I slept. Or specific workouts to help decrease the stress on my shoulders and elbows from sleeping at odd angles on my side (since I can’t really lay fully on my side side in my bed without knocking my CPAP mask askew). And, most recently to address this latest surge of back pain, a way of tucking my pillows around me so that I CAN’T move while I sleep, coupled with letting myself wake up enough once a night to turn over and shift all my pillows around so I can sleep on my other side. Tons of little tricks that are no longer doing the trick.
Continue readingPosting Through A Depression Spike
It has been a while since I’ve written about it as anything other than a tangent on a post, but I’m still struggling with my now months-long depression spike. It has definitely helped that I rarely leave work while it is still fully dark outside and that I’m able to get more sun than ever during my walks (though I’m needing to wear sunscreen now, which is not my favorite, since one of the medications I’m taking makes my skin incredibly sensitive to sunburn). That’s not enough, though, since I’m still struggling to get enough sleep and the constant grind of stress and long work days at my job are more than counteracting the positive effects of the longer days and greater exposure to sunlight. Not to mention that I feel like I’ve been struggling to connect with my friends lately and while that is probably just the depression talking, I still feel like I’m not as socially active as I used to be. I’m also struggling to make space for my own creativity and what space I do make (mostly these blog posts) feels tainted by all the stress and frustration I feel with the shit WordPress’ owner keeps trying to pull. I’ve still got my tabletop games, but most of those don’t meet as regularly as I’d like and they all have their own stressors as I try to avoid getting caught up in anxiety spirals around stuff my players said or did that could be interpreted as them not enjoying themselves.
Continue readingSleep Paralysis
Robyn’s mind drifted to the surface of consciousness. Something heavy was draped over them. Unfortunately, since they slept on their side, they couldn’t see what it was. They couldn’t turn to look, either. They were paralyzed.
Trying to stay calm, they slowly worked through their insensate body. Knees wrapped around a pillow, left arm curled into the corner of the sheet, torso propped up by pillows, and head supported by more pillows. Only their right arm was unaccounted for.
Pushing against the numbness, Robyn tried to raise their right arm.When nothing happened, they pushed through the building fear and realized the arm wrapped in the sheets was holding them in place.
When they managed to shift their left arm enough, the blankets loosened and the numbness began to fade. Feeling began to return to their body.
Just as they were about to try moving their right arm again, Robyn felt a light, puffing wind on their neck. They froze, paralyzed by panic, as something warm and wet fell onto their neck.
Fear took over and they wrenched free of the blankets. They sat up and fumbled for their lamp. When the light clicked on, their room was empty. Their bedroom door was still closed and their oscillating fan gently puffed at their hair as they panted. There was nothing in the room.Nothing had been sitting on them. It was just the fan and their sweat.
They rifled a hand through their hair as they breathed a sigh of relief. A moment later, they realized they weren’t actually sweaty. They raised a hand to their neck and it came away wet, a few viscous drops of liquid clinging to it. As they stared at their hand, they felt the frame of their bed shift as something beneath it moved.
The First Step Is Sleeping. After That, Everything’s Doable.
It finally happened. I finally had people over to just hang out. Took three and a half months, but it finally happened. They weren’t my first house guests, since I’ve hosted an in-person tabletop game day for a Pathfinder 2e one-shot (that became at least a two-shot) and had a friend stay the night just a couple weeks ago, but they were the first people I had over with the express purpose of just occupying my space with me. It was really nice. We didn’t do much, other than hang out, go pick up pizza, and then idly watch the first two thirds of the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring while we made idle chitchat, ate our food, and did stuff on our phones. Exactly the kind of chill, no expectations, no greater purpose type of hanging out I’ve been wanting. Now all I gotta do is make it happen again! Hopefully in less than three and a half months. It’ll probably be easier, what with the impending winter, but you can never know for certain. Some winters, people will just hole up in their homes and avoid leaving it for anything other than necessity. Some winters, people can’t wait to escape their homes for any reason at all. You never know until it’s happening.
Continue readingI Miss Pretending To Be Someone Else
I’ve been so busy lately that I’ve hardly had the time or energy for doing anything after work other than settling down in front of my TV and not moving again until it’s time to go to bed. I had plans to start putting a puzzle together or maybe work on a Lego set at some point this week (in an effort to spend some time away from screens and take a break from books. The book break isn’t because they’re bad or they’re twisting my mind in some way (though doing a massive binge of The Dresden Files has definitely influenced my recent dreams, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post), but because I’m spending too much time hunched over things or folded up in chairs. I need some activities that let me sprawl. Or, I thought I’d need them since I planned to get a full week of daily workouts in this week. Instead, I’ve done zero workouts, stuggled to get to sleep on time, and all the energy I have for any given day has been consumed by work as I juggle projects, prepare for a company event (that has happened by the time this goes up), and attempts to sort through my feelings about a whole range of stuff.
Continue readingDark Days And Long, Sleepless Nights
As I was going through some notes, I realized it has been two and a half months since this one night where I was so stressed out that I wound up staying up all night. I wasn’t exactly well-rested going into that evening, but I thought I’d be able to handle it without too much of a problem given how frequently I used to be able to go without sleep. While I did, eventually, get through the day, it was not the simple but tiring experience I remembered. Much to my chagrin, given how much I relied on this ability to carry me through my bouts of insomnia, I have slowly but surely reached the age where I can’t function without any sleep. It is an unfortunate fact of getting older, but more unfortunate is that this loss hasn’t come with a corresponding increase in my body’s day-to-day demands for sleep. I still struggle to fall asleep just as much as I used to and the impacts of losing sleep seem to hit me harder. At least until it comes time to fall asleep, again. At that point, it pretty much counts for nothing.
Continue reading