I am waiting for the phone to ring, Teressa and John are due to come and see us today the first time we have seen each other since Christmas. To be far I doubt I will get a call before 12, after all, they are on holiday and as she is staying with her brother, I know last night will have included more alcohol than is good for anyone. It is always the same when she comes here to see us, they don’t arrive until mid afternoon, when I am already starting to tire and they stay here right through until my bed time, which leaves me exhausted but it is one of the few times I don’t care. When it come to our children we all do what we shouldn’t and we all will do anything for them, without the slightest thought. One of the big pluses about their visit is it pushes Adam into cleaning the house, all of the rooms, not just one, wait a week, then the next, resulting in the first being knee deep in dust and double the work than just keeping them all at a constant level.

I ran out of energy last night and headed to bed not long after 8 pm, I knew I wasn’t going to make it right through the night as my bladder clamped up and wouldn’t empty, something it is doing more and more, but there is little I can do about it other than catheter and I keep avoiding that. When I woke at 5:30 I was surprised, but I was to find all the hall doors open, I had to check that Adam had put the dishwasher on and once in the kitchen, I had to have a cigarette. I couldn’t have been up more than 10 minutes, nearly all of it was spent sitting down, so when I lay down again I was shocked to find that I was going through all the closedown issues I have when I go to bed for a nap, or for the night. All my limbs and my rib hugs appeared almost the second that I lay down again, I honestly don’t remember that ever happening before, I had always put it down as just being the built up exhaustion of the day, I had been up 10 minutes, there was nothing to build. On waking with the alarm I felt just as I usually do, almost fine until I actually wake up properly. But it has set me wondering, for most of my adult life if I woke up during the night I always landed up staying up as going back to bed was a waste of time. I always found that I was fighting against getting comfortable again, I always found that everything ached just too much to sleep and that I just couldn’t switch off enough to sleep. Since I have been on stronger painkillers for the first time I could just sleep and sleep, without the slightest problem. In fact, within days I learned to sleep my full 8hrs and it has slowly risen since then, but as I have written I have suddenly found myself waking at odd hours for no real reason, but so tired still that I couldn’t get up and stay up. It is just now that I have drawn the links together, my pain levels have been rising and rising during the day, with them out of control, well I am once again struggling to stay asleep, even though I need it. I have been on the raised level of Morphine now for over a week, so I would have thought that I would be fine now, but last night I needing the toilet, I caused an interruption strong enough to wake me and put me back into pain, pain bad enough to stop me sleeping.

Now that I have written all that, I feel really really stupid, surely that should have all been as clear as day and I should have been able to sort it out before. The only reason I don’t think I did, is because it has been happening for so long and at the start of it my pain wasn’t that bad, just an ache that wouldn’t let my brain and body shut down. I guess that we all wonder through life accepting without question what happens, especially as this started when no one would even believe I was in pain, back then I was just living life any way that I could and my questions were as limited as my knowledge.

So today is going to be a good day, a day when I am not going to listen to my body for one single second unless, of course, it makes me, but otherwise, today is about good people and good conversation, laughter and fun. I know at the end of it I will sleep, sleep deeply and I will keep telling myself that regardless what happens.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 03/08/12 – Brought up to be well

Adam came home last night proudly clutching a plastic box of red currents that he picked yesterday in his Mums garden, I got the impression from what he said it was the first time he had really spent a little time picking fruit as he seemed surprised at the quantity he had gathered. Even though it was in a garden I think he had felt a little of what I keep talking about, the simple joy of gathering and…..