About sleep

I’d like some, uninterrupted, please.

So I’m in a situation where my abdominal muscles, while slowly gaining back some strength and stamina, are pretty much hors d’combat right now. I can do some things, but there’s a big price in pain.

Getting into/out of bed is one of those things where I’ve developed a little bit of a system, but it still puts stress on the abs. (And yes, I looked into those grab handle thingies. They don’t work with air mattresses like our Sleep Number.)

But the biggest challenge is getting my brain to just STOP. Take last night, for instance. In bed maybe 10:30pm, got maybe 1:45 of sleep, then awake for bathroom break, and then something about needing to pay for something in Polish Zlotys and how that was going to be tricky and oh, this hurts, and oh, that hurts, too, and oh, need to go to the bathroom again, and oh, I wonder if I should empty my bag while I’m in there, and… if I got more than a half-hour contiguous actual sleep after that, I’d be surprised.

Right now, the main sources of hurt are the incision site where it’s open and packed, the left side where my guts were rearranged and sewn to my fascia to make my colostomy, and a little section on the right side that managed to alarm me about maybe being appendicitis except that the pain exists entirely in the upper layer of fascia and only when I bend it.

To the surgeon tomorrow, for more staple removal and maybe a plan adjustment on the open part, plus an appointment with the oncologist to try to establish our plan once I’m healed enough.

I may be able to start taking the good pain med again tomorrow – ran the course of the antibiotics that had a bad interaction with said pain med.

But man, I wish I could get my brain to stop and let me sleep. It needs it, too. I mean, Zlotys? Really?