I’m about two and a half months into my physical therapy and sleep recovery efforts now. As I’m writing this (a while ago, actually, but I’ve done a more thorough editing pass to get it up-to-date), I’ve finally hit a point where I was able to sleep for seven consecutive hours. Which isn’t as much as I’d like, of course, but it’s nearly double what I was getting back in September and early October, when things were at their worst. Also, while I’m still waking up due to pain and soreness, I can now go do a few stretches and then go back to sleep for another two or three hours. Or least I could back when I was getting a maximum of six hours of sleep at a stretch. I’ll have spent the last few weekends trying (with mixed results) to get as much sleep as possible since the week before US Thanksgiving (the second-to-last week of November) was physically draining in a way I haven’t experienced in years, as was the week after US Thanksgiving, but that was very clearly due to work stress in a way that the aforementioned week wasn’t. I managed to get several nights of quality sleep while I was away from work, but I’ve still been dozing off at my desk every single day so it clearly wasn’t enough (or wasn’t of sufficient quality) to make me actually feel rested. As it turns out, since there is an unfortunate intermingling of issues I’m dealing with, I’ve hit the upper-limit on how much sleep I can get and the worsening of those intermingling issues has actually started to cut down on how much sleep I can get, thanks to the once-again-worsening back, shoulder, and now general joint pain I’ve got going on.
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Working Out My Aches And Pains
Over the last couple months, I’ve been on a new medication that has given me the primary side-effects of drier skin along with more joint and muscle aches. One of the potential side effects is horrible sunburn, so it’s probably for the best that I’ll be doing the majority of this course of medication during the less sunny months of the year, but the losing battle I’m fighting against keeping my skin from drying out and bleeding all the time has me wondering if maybe it’d be better to have waited for the spring when the heat wasn’t on full-blast at work. I mean, the humidity dropping into the single digits in my workplace is rough enough during a normal year and thowing a medication side-effect that is causing my skin to dry out in places it never has before (namely my face, though everywhere else is also drying out worse than it ever has before) has me feeling pretty exhausted most days. Which might also be another side-effect of the medication I’m on, but that’s difficult to say one way or another given my penchant for insomnia and that moving through the stiffness that accompanies the joint aches requires more effort on my part than moving around usually does. Still, given why I’m taking the medication, it’s probably worth it. After all, these side effects are a temporary problem and the medication will hopefully fix a long term issue (and all signs to point to it fixing that issue, so far, even after only two and a half months).
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