Parents: Who remembers the first time your baby slept through the night? It’s both wonderful and horrible, right? I had a stark memory of that just last week.
As most of you know, I have several chronic illnesses. This means I don’t sleep much, and when I do sleep, it’s not quality sleep. The pain is constant, I get tremors that are impossible to sleep through, my joints sometimes dislocate if I move wrong, and I’m too damn stubborn to medicate heavily enough to knock myself clean out. To be fair, the meds that put you to sleep that heavily are not a good match for my health status, so it’s just me, Advil, and the occasional Benadryl “treat” fighting the good fight every night.
Once in a while, though, I either get a slight remission in my symptoms, or I just get so exhausted that my mind and body give up, and I actually get a decent night’s sleep. That happened last week.
I had several really bad nights in a row and then one night, like a miracle, I just passed the fuck out and slept for over 11 hours.
I woke up and it took a minute to realize that I hadn’t gotten up during the night, hadn’t taken 3 hours to fall asleep, and almost felt human. Then the panic set in, and I had that memory of my oldest daughter sleeping through the night for the very first time.
The feelings were exactly the same:
Eyes open
Hey, I feel pretty good!
What time is it?
Holy shit, it’s actually morning.
Wait…what happened?
Oh, God, is everything ok?!
When it’s your baby, you hold that monitor up to your ear, desperately listening for a coo or a breath. Then you creep to the door and hesitate for a moment before you open it, because you don’t really want to see what’s on the other side. You’ve been up at least once or twice a night for months, and the silence seems so loud.
When it’s yourself, you go through the rest of the day monitoring– how do I feel? am I overly groggy? should I check in with one of my doctors? did I sleep that long because something new or even worse is wrong with me? With chronic illness, you learn to monitor “normal for me” instead of “normal”. If you followed the rules of normal for the rest of the population, you’d never leave the ER. It’s something different that is the red flag for us.
When something feels off or different, it’s natural to panic. Once that panic subsides, though, and you see your baby smiling at you from the crib, or make it through the day without collapsing (and probably go right back to your shit sleep the next night), you can finally exhale and appreciate what you got, even if it was just one good night of rest.
Change, even good change, can feel like danger when you’ve just been surviving for a long time. Sometimes our bodies don’t know the difference between danger and unfamiliar peace.
The truth is, I don’t fully trust good nights. But I’ll take them. Even if my first reaction is mild terror.