Today (the day I wrote this), I took a day off of work. I woke up feeling pretty crummy and in desperate need of more sleep, so I spent a little time debating myself about the merits of taking another day off versus going into the office and eventually agreed to let myself take a day off if I spent some time doing some chores I’d been putting off once I’d finished sleeping. It took a bit longer than normal to make up my mind because I felt kind of out of it, kind of mentally foggy, but the generally exhausted and ill feeling of my entire being that morning made it a pretty easy decision in the end. Unfortunately, sleeping didn’t really make me feel that much better. I felt a bit more clear-headed for a while, but the mental fog has returned by the evening (when I’m writing this) and though my stomach problems passed eventually, like they have every morning this week, I still felt crummy enough that I only did one of the chores I bargained with myself about. Given how I feel awful still, I’m pretty sure I’ll still have tomorrow to do the balance of them. I mean, I literally went back to sleep for another three hours and STILL felt exhausted and murky when I woke up. Almost like the sleep I got wasn’t terribly helpful, like back when my insomnia was at its worst and I’d be able to sleep a whole nine or ten hours and feel the same way as if I’d taken a very long nap. It’s not a great feeling to wake up tired, decide to take a day off so you can rest, get as much rest as you can, and then still feel tired and out of sorts.
Continue readingInsomnia
Spring Weather, Sleep Schedules, And Catching Sick
It is officially spring. At least it is when I’m writing this. Who knows when you’re reading this (but chances are good that it is also spring, given how infrequently old posts of mine resurface). It is the first of Spring today and the weather has stopped its mad fluctuations for at least a little bit. Next week holds the promise of some wild swings between freezing weather and the seventies, so who know what kind of day you’ll be reading this on, but the days before it will be proper, early-Spring days and most of the days after it will be proper early-spring days, so I’m looking forward to having at least a little stability in the weather for a while. After all, things have been jumping up and down (in both temperature and air pressure), that I’ve been decidedly under the weather for a while now. It’s usually not that bad, unless it’s jumping forty degrees in a single day, but I’ve been in a rough place for a while now, due to burnout and exhaustion, so even a little bit takes a toll on me. Still, thanks to feeling buoyed by sunlight, how late sunset is these days, and generally uplifted by the warm weather, I managed to push through it. Then I got a stomach bug, got laid out for two days dealing with that, and then everything came crashing down on me, keeping me laid out for another three days. It was rough, but I’m coming out the other side of it feeling better than I have in a while.
Continue readingThe Sleep(less) Saga Continues: This Time With Some Answers
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 readingThe 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.
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