Living with it

It's 4:15 AM. I've been up for an hour. I went to bed around 1, fell asleep pretty quickly as usual, in spite of the fact that I had slept for much of the day. At 3:08 I woke up because it felt like half of my body was on fire. I don't know, maybe actual burning is worse, I hope I never find out. But there's no way I'm getting back to sleep with this, so back downstairs I go.

I've discovered over the 2 1/2 weeks I've been dealing with shingles that the worst of the pain is mitigated by walking, so I stumble downstairs and put on my running shoes and start to walk back and forth the length of the house. At least I decided to stop using Benadryl, which I was taking in hopes that it would help me sleep, but instead made me foggy when I woke up 2 hours later, just like when I didn't take the pills.

So back and forth I go. By now I've developed a bit of a routine. I pick an album and listen as I walk, back and forth in the dim light. It seems to take almost exactly a minute to make the round trip from the kitchen, through the den, the front hall, the living room and then turning around in the office and repeating in descending order. This has helped me to understand that, however endless the night feels when you can't sleep, it really isn't endless, you can count it down, one lap at a time.

Today I listened to a Fountains of Wayne album, a song from which had been running through my head the previous day. It sounded very good and the music helps to distract me from what is really going on, that I'm pacing back and forth in my house in the middle of the night.

At 4 AM I stop and check what's on TV. A rerun of the Rachel Maddow show that aired a few hours previous. I think she's brilliant and I like listening to her in limited doses, so I do that until 4:15 while I eat my late night snack, cereal usually. I know at 4AM you're supposed to go to Taco Bell, but I'm not supposed to drive on my medication and I don't feel like walking there.

And speaking of medication, why do I not have something that will help this pain that comes every night? I've gotten over 2 hours sleep exactly 3 times in the past 2 weeks. The problem is that this can go on for a long time and they don't want to get me addicted to something, so the strongest painkillers are out of bounds. What I take helps somewhat during the day but gets overwhelmed every night.

Now 4:35. See? Not so infinite. Only 2 hours until I would have woken up anyway, and only an hour and a half until the sky starts to brighten, although it appears to be rainy at the moment.

I have a lesson plan I need to complete and forward to school for my business math elective. Unlike the regular math lesson plans, my colleagues can't write these. It's taken me hours to get this done because I can't seem to focus for more than a few minutes at a time without getting dizzy and since I ended up asleep, or at least partially so, for most of the evening I never got it done. Oh well I'll wrap it up and send it in and it'll probably be okay.

Okay, this is starting to hurt just sitting here, so I'll just post this and off for another walk. It's now 4:40 and this is my life, like it or not.