Pain

Sometimes I will get up in the night and do various things. I’m not aware of it at the time I’m doing it because I’m technically asleep, but when I awaken in the morning, I will see evidence of it. Sometimes things are moved around. Sometimes things are broken. And sometimes, I injure myself.

This phenomenon more often occurs when people take sleeping pills. And that’s why I don’t take sleeping pills. If I do it when I’m not taking meds, then what in the world will I be doing if I am taking meds?

At the moment I’m suffering pain in my right side from something that happened two days ago. I don’t know what happened, because I have no memory of it. My conscious brain was asleep, but the part of my brain that allows me to do things like walk around and even drive a car, was awake.

A few days ago, in the mid-day hours, I lay down for a nap. When I awoke, I looked at the clock beside my bed and it read 7:00. “Holy cow,” I thought, “I’ve slept through the whole day, and now it’s 7PM.” But I got up and came to the living room and when I sat at my computer and looked at the time, I saw it displayed 7AM. “No way,” I thought, “That isn’t possible,” and I turned on the TV. Indeed, the regular morning shows were on the air. I had slept through the previous day as well as the night. 

I don’t know how I hurt my rib cage. In fact, I’m not even sure that I did hurt it. Maybe it’s a terminal disease, maybe some kind of cancer. Or maybe I’m just clumsy as I walk around asleep. I had planned to go to the pharmacy and pick up a prescription on Thursday. But now I have become aware that today is Thursday. No problem, I’ll go tomorrow. But I did lose a day somewhere. Maybe that was the day that I thought I slept through. Maybe that was the day I injured myself. Maybe.

I’m waiting for the day when I wake up to find my grass has been mowed and my shrubs have been trimmed. That would be great, but I don’t think that “sleeping me” has that much get-up-and-go. It’s “awake me” that has to do the yard work.

If I’m still hurting by next week I’ll make an appointment with my doctor. She’ll ask me questions and press on my side and say, “Does that hurt?” and she’ll send me to the hospital to get a CT scan. I’ll sit in a waiting room for 7 hours (been there, done that) then they’ll scan me. They’ll say everything is normal and bill me $12,000. (That was the cost of my last scan.)

And life goes on.