Tales from a hospital bed 9

Sleep. It’s an essential element of our wellbeing. When it is disrupted or inadequate we do not function as well – physically, emotionally and psychologically. Sleeping in hospital can be a challenge. Here’s a sleepy tale shaped by recent nocturnal events.

Immediately after surgery and in the following few days, sleep came quite easily. No doubt my body was partly in shock, partly exhausted and wholly medicated. Gradually in the second week of recovery my general health and wellbeing has stabilised. I have had less drugs (in fact, no painkillers for 12 hours) and I feel balance is returning.

Alongside of these improvements has come a discomfort with sleeping in an upright position. I have to sleep with my head higher than my body, to help breathing. This means I sleep on my back, spreadeagled on the bed, facing the far wall. In the early exhausted, drugged nights I didn’t notice any discomfort. Now, with greater clarity, things are changing.

Before last night I had experienced two consecutive nights where I had awoken at 2ish and not been able to get back to sleep for several hours. As you can imagine I was pretty tired last night approaching 10pm. But I was also restless and agitated, once I turned the light off and tried to sleep, I got progressively more agitated.

My t-shirt irritated me, so I changed it. My legs were restless, so I got up and walked a little. I tossed and turned. The upright position got right on my nerves. I just wanted to turn over onto my side and lie flat. So, I tried that. Very uncomfortable. My legs twitched. I felt awash with fidgety, frayed energy.

After discussing my frustrations with the nurse on duty I final fell into a deep, deep sleep. So deep that when they did the usual observation tests I didn’t stir. I know this because  I was dragged from the depths by a voice saying, ” Lee, Lee, Lee.” I struggled to the surface, looked at the mocking clock (2.40pm) and heard, “Your blood sugar is 4.2, you need something to eat or drink.”

Diabetes is just one more complication. Keeping a balanced sugar level is more challenging because of all the meds and the varying recovery rates. But anything below 4 is a risk. So food and drink is required. I drank the offered apple juice, then remembered Dinah’s earlier foodie gifts, got up again and consumed two cheese straws and a biscuit. That done I laid back down.

Still heavy with deep sleep I hoped for a swift return. At 4.30 I felt like I hadn’t slept, but time had passed in a snap. Eventually, deeper, dream filled sleep returned and I slept through til 6.45. Yep, they gave me a lie in from the 6am observations.

Now, I feel my weight in the day. Solid as a blancmange. Heady and heavy. The photos with this post were created feeling and sharing this experience. It’s a fabulous gift, to not only write about how I feel, but also to create photos that attempt to share those feelings visually. Because sometimes words are not enough. Sometimes they are too much. Photography can share it all, in a moment.

P.S. For those of you interested in these things. I used my travelling camera set. A first generation Fuji XT-10 with a 27mm pancake lens. I set it to manual focus, defocussed the lens and looked at what I could see. Whilst I created the photos in colour, I had black and white in mind as I created them. Editing was done in Lightroom.