Fatigue

About a week ago – which was a couple of weeks into my current series (I’m still trying to find right nomenclature for this thing and its aspects/forms) I realised around one midday that I was absolutely wasted. I barely made it to the couch before crashing.

It was unusual: Sure, I am a bad sleeper anyway ( a family thing… I can usually call my sister in London at 2am there and she’s up watching a movie or browsing the Net) – but this was different. Is different (because it’s hanging around)

I realised that it’s a result of how badly I am sleeping at night.
When you only sleep for a few hours anyway (about 3-4 hours is par for my nocturnal golf course), sometime inside those hours your body does a grateful dive into deep sleep.

It’s different now. In the current form of my T-pain, if I sleep on my right side, gravity dictates that my right-side sinuses will build up congestion to a point where it reaches nerve ignition level and I will wake up with Spike gnawing at my head.

Then…
Wake up, sit up.
Wait for pain to subside. (about 10-15 minutes)
Lie back, roll over on left.
Fall asleep.

And here’s my problem: Ever since my stroke, for the past 12 years I’ve been sleeping on my right side. Strokes leave some very weird artefacts in your body. One is that when I sleep on my left side, I’m sleeping on a sack of potatoes. Or construction rubble.

That’s just me. Even without that, I think it’s standard sleep operating protocol to change sides or move around in your sleep. Especially the older you are.

So in my sleep, my body goes into auto-pilot and I roll over on my right.

And…cycle repeat.

It’s ok. Once I figured that out, I just had to add in some extra sleep (sitting up) during the day.
I mention this here because fatigue was not really on my radar. If you have any sort of chronic pain, watch your sleep, watch your fatigue levels.