Last night my wife wanted to go to bed early as she’d had a very busy week, and since she takes care of me, wouldn’t survive without her and love her with all my heart I agreed.
One of the benefits of #CFS is that you can sleep anywhere at anytime, and yes that is part of the curse as well!
So 8.30pm and I get to sleep reasonably quickly (about an hour instead of the several hours it normally takes). Then I wake up, check my watch and I think it says 12.30am. Wow! Four hours straight for me is excellent!….yes, another side affect of this lovely illness is I don’t sleep well. I also have #Fibromyalgia and the pain keeps me awake most nights, fighting against my Chronic Fatigue and winning.
Then I check the time again, with my glasses on, and it’s only 10.30pm.
Bugger!
And now I’m wired-tired. This is the symptom where my brain is screaming at me to jump up and run around the block a few times (the wired part), and yet I know for a fact that after I jump out of bed I will collapse on the floor and have to do nothing for days, maybe weeks, to recover.
So, I’m dead tired yet my brain wants to run around the block. So I lie there and try to rest, concentrate on my breathing, and in the silence I am now more aware of my pain, dizziness, tinitis and have no energy to even turn over in bed. And yet I want to run a marathon. My body must really hate me!
Time ticks by, very slowly, not much I can do about that. So I compose this post in my mind to distract myself from those symptoms and, eventually, get back to sleep.
And wake up again every hour, to go through the same process again.
I hate nighttime!
It is now 5.40am and I can’t cope with this sleeplessness any longer, hence I’m writing this post. Then, like every other day, I will fall asleep suddenly only to wake up with my head in a very awkward position and an accompanying neck ache.
To try to stay awake I’ll play a movie on TV, and have to rewind it four or five times as I keep falling asleep. I also have no energy to get out of bed to get the breakfast my wonderful wife has made for me.
This goes on until early afternoon when I drag myself out of bed, get my breakfast and lunch (so I don’t need to get up again, it’s too hard) and take them back to bed.
At about 4pm I get up to join my wife in the living room and collapse into my reclining chair, fighting off sleep and the need to, still, run a marathon.
Then I eat dinner, maybe stay up another hour if I can, then it’s back to bed.
Repeat. Ad nauseum.
Welcome to my illness (well, part of it anyway…oh yes there is more, but I don’t want to give it all away at once!).
The final insult is my brain fog, so sometimes I’ll struggle out of bed to get my breakfast and lunch, yet when I get to the kitchen I can’t remember why I went there. Cursing I’ll go back to bed, hunched over my stick like a 90 year old man, until I remember what it was I’d got up for.
Cursing, I’ll go back to the kitchen saying to myself; “breakfast and lunch, breakfast and lunch” so I don’t forget this time.
The joys of ME/CFS and Fibromyalgia. And yet the majority of doctors still don’t believe it’s an illness. Thank goodness more research is being done in this area now.
…..I’m sorry, what was I talking about?
My Chronic Illness & Other Thoughts 