sleep

Weekend Writing Prompt — Like a Spinning Top

Fandango8 Comments

I’m feeling dizzy
Everything around me is spinning
But I’m not moving at all

My sense of balance is gone
I’m spinning faster and faster
I can’t stand up

The nausea is building
I can’t hold it back any longer
I puke my guts out

I crawl into my bed
I’m in a small boat in rough seas
Rocking with the waves

I close my eyes tight
And pray for sleep with all my might
So that when I awaken

The vertigo will be gone.

(Exactly 85 words)

Written for Sammi Cox’s Weekend Writing Prompt, where the challenge is “vertigo” in exactly 85 words. Photo credit: news.medical.net.

Writer’s Workshop — You Never Knew What I Loved in You

Fandango12 Comments

For his Writer’s Workshop this week, John Holton gives us six writing prompts and we are tasked with choosing one of the prompts (or as many as we want) and writing a post that addresses that (or those) prompt(s). I chose three prompts for this week: (1) use the word “sleep,” and (2) write a post in exactly 8 sentences, and (5) Take a line from a song you like and use it as the title for your post, then let your ideas flow. The line I chose is from the Jackson Browne song, “Late for the Sky.”

Sleep has alluded me over the past few nights because I can’t stop thinking about the two of us. I lay here in bed awake yet again, you at my side, and I wonder if we are nearing the end of the deep love we once felt for each other.

I feel as though you never knew what I loved in you and I certainly don’t know what you loved in me. Yet for a while our paths, tightly intertwined, seem to climb. But as I look at you in your sleep and hear your steady breathing, I realize that we have become perfect strangers with little to say to one another anymore.

How is it that those magic feelings we once shared have drifted into the past and our bright future together slipped between the fingers of our hands?

I must accept that neither of us is the person we hoped the other would be. I’ll be gone when you wake up in the morning, and I hope you, too, will see, as I have, that we have reached the end of the road together.


Badge by Patty, http://anothercookieplease.com

AI artwork from ideogram.ai

Writer’s Workshop — Lack of Energy

Fandango6 Comments

For his Writer’s Workshop, John Holton gives us six writing prompts and we are tasked with choosing one of the prompts (or as many as we want) and writing a post that addresses that prompt. The prompt I chose this week was: Tell us about the most exhausted you’ve ever felt.

I’d had some broken bones in the past — a broken rib, a broken finger, a broken toe. But those were relatively minor breaks compared with fracturing a hip in January 2023. I fell off a ladder and landed in such a way that I fractured my left hip and my right humerus at the shoulder. I underwent an emergency partial hip replacement on the day of the fall and spent the next two weeks in the hospital: three days in acute care and ten days in the physical rehab wing.

After being in the hospital for a week, I felt exhausted almost all of the time, especially after undergoing four physical and occupational therapy sessions a day. I was struggling, not only physically but emotionally, and was even having a tough time finding the energy to blog.

I wrote a post titled “No Energy,” expressing how I was feeling at a period of time when I felt totally exhausted.

Here it is:

No energy
No energy to talk
No ability to walk
Can’t get in and out of bed by myself
Can’t go to the bathroom on my own
My left leg feels like dead weight
Muscles not responding to instructions from my brain
Physical and occupational therapy sessions four times a day
Painful, grueling, and exhausting
But as they say, “no pain no gain.”
Who the fuck are they?

All I do is eat a little
(No appetite for this hospital food)
Between therapy sessions
Spend most of my time trying to sleep
Lots of weird, strange dreams
Where I’m able bodied
And then I wake up in this place
In the middle of my nightmare
Is it any wonder I’m depressed?

They say they’re sending me home next Friday
For the next phase of my recovery
I’m doing what I can
Fighting through the pain
To be ready for that
In the meantime
No energy to open WordPress
No energy to write
No energy to read, like, or comment.
No energy to thank all of you
Who have wished me well
Wished me a rapid recovery
Thank you
Badge by Patty, http://anothercookieplease.com

Truthful Tuesday — Sleeping Arrangements

Fandango4 Comments

Di, of Pensitivity101, is our host for Truthful Tuesday. This week Di wants to know…

Do you allow your pet/s to sleep on your bed?

Our cat — a stray black cat with green eyes — who wandered up on our porch and never left, slept anywhere he wanted to sleep and, most often, it was in our bed.

Our previous dog — a mixed Lab/shepherd — was crate trained, and she would happily hop into her crate each night when it was time to go to sleep. It was a soft, foldable crate that we used for our semi-annual cross country road trips with her and she loved it.

Our previous dog left us in November 2021 and our cat passed in January 2022. That was it. No more pets, we said. We’re too old and we want the freedom that not having a pet — especially a dog — gives you.

So naturally, in March 2022, less that two months after our cat died, we rescued a dog that looked like a yellow Lab mix. The shelter told us she was a yellow Lab mix. Turns out, though, after having a doggie-DNA test, she is mostly American pit bull. And she had no interest whatsoever in sleeping in a crate. It took her about an hour to destroy the soft crate or previous dog loved.

So where does this 70 pound pit bull in Labrador retriever’s clothing sleep? Anywhere she wants to, which happens to be on our bed.

SYW/BI — 01/23/2023

Fandango20 Comments
Share Your World
Blogging insights

It’s about 9:00 Monday night here in the post-operative acute care orthopedic rehab center and I just had the best dump I’ve taken in eight days, which makes me a happy camper! So I thought, before I turn in for the night, I’d celebrate my accomplishment by taking a few minutes to respond to two of my favorite Monday prompts, Di’s Share Your World prompt and Dr Tanya’s Blogging Insights prompt.

Let’s start with Share Your World. Di asks:

1. Do you find it relatively easy to fall asleep at night?

Before my accident, I found it relatively easy to fall asleep, but not so easy to stay asleep due to having to get up and pee at least once during the night. Since my accident last Saturday, I’m so exhausted from pain and the physical and occupational therapy sessions I’m having four times a day, I fall asleep almost the instant I close my eyes.

2. Do you remember your dreams?

Maybe for 15 to 30 seconds after I wake up. But then my dreams, for the most part, just disappear from my memory. The only exceptions are recurring dreams that I’ve had and I can usually remember them because, well, they’re recurring.

Interestingly, I’ve had a lot of really weird dreams since being in the hospital, and I do remember at least the gist, if not the details, of some of those dreams.

3. If you can’t sleep, do you watch TV, read or listen to music in the hope you will nod off?

I either play solitaire on my iPhone or read blog posts on my iPhone until I can no longer keep my eyes open and am able to nod off.

4. Can you literally sleep anywhere (chair, sofa, bus, train, flight, etc.)?

If I’m really tired, I can, indeed, fall asleep pretty much anywhere. But a nice comfy bed is always my preference.

Now for Blogging Insights. Dr Tanya asks:

Do you write directly on a device? Are you old school, do you write on paper first?

When I first started blogging back in 2005, I’d draft my post using Microsoft Word on my laptop and then copy and paste it to my Blogger-hosted blog. But for the past six or seven years, I draft my post using either WordPress.com on my iPhone or using the WordPress app for iOS on my iPhone. Today, I almost exclusively use the iOS app.

Do you re-draft? If so, how many times?

Except when I’m responding to a Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, where the only editing you’re technically permitted to do is to correct typos and misspellings, I do a lot of redrafting. I proofread, edit, move things around, re-edit, re-proofread, and do it as many times as I think necessary before I’m happy enough with my post to hit Publish. I’d say, on average, I have ten to twenty redrafts for each post.

No Energy

Fandango73 Comments 

No energy
No energy to talk
No ability to walk
Can’t get in and out of bed by myself
Can’t go to the bathroom on my own
My left leg feels like dead weight
Muscles not responding to instructions from my brain
Physical and occupational therapy sessions four times a day
Painful, grueling, and exhausting
But as they say, “no pain no gain.”
Who the fuck are they?

All I do is eat a little
(No appetite for this hospital food)
Between therapy sessions
Spend most of my time trying to sleep
Lots of weird, strange dreams
Where I’m able bodied
And then I wake up in this place
In the middle of my nightmare
Is it any wonder I’m depressed?

They say they’re sending me home next Friday
For the next phase of my recovery
I’m doing what I can
Fighting through the pain
To be ready for that
In the meantime
No energy to open WordPress
No energy to write
No energy to read, like, or comment.
No energy to thank all of you
Who have wished me well
Wished me a rapid recovery
Thank you

TMP — Spasms

Fandango40 Comments

Every Monday, Paula Light, with her The Monday Peeve prompt, gives us an opportunity to vent or rant about something that pisses us off.

Before you read further, I want to let you know that I’m feeling very sorry for myself, and this is going to be a long (for me), whiny post in which I complain about being in pain. So if you don’t want to continue to read about my trials and tribulations, I invite you to move on. I won’t hold it against you.

For those who choose to read on…

Yesterday I posted here about a freak accident of being lassoed around my feet by my dog’s leash, causing me to fall hard, and, as my wife, who witnessed the whole thing said, “comically,” on my back. I think she realized that it wasn’t so comical when I couldn’t get up without her help.

Anyway, it was painful, yes, but the pain was bearable until the muscle spasm started. With almost any movement — a twist, a turn, bending, reaching, or even taking a deep breath — I would experience agonizingly painful muscle spasms in my lower back. I mean excruciatingly painful, tear-inducing spasms. I’m usually pretty good at dealing with pain, but these spasms were seriously over-the-top on the pain barometer.

As I experimented with ways to stop the spasms, I discovered that, strangely, standing and slowly walking, or sitting upright on a hard-backed chair, like a kitchen chair, was about the only way to control the spasms. Taking Advil every four house and a CBD gummy every six hours seemed to help, too. At least a little bit.

By early evening I had experienced some success in keeping the spasms to a minimum. I was feeling better and was up for taking our dog out for her last walk of the night. In retrospect, that wasn’t such a grand idea.

When we got back from the walk, and it was time to go to bed, I took four more Advil liqui-gels and another CBD gummy, hoping that I could control or at least minimize the spasm so that I’d be able to get a decent sleep. But it was not to be.

As soon as I attempted to lie down on the bed, whether on my back, my stomach, or my side, my lower back muscles would seize up tight and I would literally groan in agony. After attempting, and failing, to get in bed without excruciating pain, I grabbed two pillows, left the bedroom (which I’m sure my wife was happy about as my groans were keeping her up), put the two pillows on our kitchen table, sat down on the chair I had been successfully sitting on most of the day, put my head down on the pillows, and tried to get some sleep.

As awkward and uncomfortable as it was, I was apparently able to dose, until, in my light sleep, I would move. And then the agonizing spasms in my back would hit me hard. Long story short, I got a total of about one-hour’s worth of sleep last night.

I called the doctor this morning, explained what had happened and what was happening with the spasms, and asked him what to do. The good news was that, based upon what I described, he was pretty sure it was not a slipped disk or a fracture, so he didn’t send me out for X-rays or an MRI. He did prescribe a strong pain medication, Tramadol, which he said could be taken in addition to Advil for pain control.

The bad news is that with a muscle injury like this, the first two or three days after the injury are the worst. While the Tramadol should help me deal with the pain, the spasms will likely continue for the next two days — and nights.

If I can’t get much more sleep tonight than I did last night, and if the spasms will be anywhere near as intense as they were last night, I’m going to be a basket case by this time tomorrow.

And that is my very whiny peeve for today.

Fibbing Friday — Getting Some Shuteye

Fandango10 Comments

Di (aka Pensitivity101) and Melanie (Sparks From a Combustible Mind) alternate as hosts for Fibbing Friday, a silly little exercise where we are to write a post with our answers to the ten questions below. But as the title suggests, truth is not an option. The idea is to fib a little, a lot, tell whoppers, be inventive, silly, or even outrageous, in our responses. This week is Melanie’s turn and she is putting us all to sleep.

To sleep like a dead weight.

Sleep is the best way to recharge.

Let sleeping help you see The Big Lie for what it really is.

I’m going to shovel the hay until I find that damn needle.

Sleep like the people in the cemetery.

Go to sleep with the dog in the doghouse you SOB!

Catch some rays while napping at the beach.

Wouldn’t lose a moment’s ticktock over it.

Burn the steak at both ends.

Sleep with one window open.