Sleep, Storms and Stan

I’ve had eight agitated nights filled with insomnia on the bounce. I’ve tried a mild sleeping pill, but I just couldn’t relax in bed. I shifted my position by twisting and turning, but I couldn't get comfortable however I lay. My head was full of anxieties. Often I would get up and read until my eyes became heavy and I yawned repeatedly. Then I would go back to bed. I might sleep for an hour or so and then wake up agitated and unrelaxed, or I might have to get up again without sleeping at all. This interminable process repeated each night. I might get perhaps a total of four hours of fitful and disturbed sleep. I realise this is the amount of sleep that Mrs Thatcher regularly had whilst Prime Minister, but she became completely mad.

I’ve had a series of exhausted and distracted days with bad headaches, and only my agitation to keep me going. I don’t know how I would have managed if this had kept up for any longer. Two nights ago I managed to get to sleep and, despite waking regularly, I slept fitfully until eight AM. During the day I again felt headachy and exhausted but I was less agitated than usual. Last night I again slept fitfully, but this time for a little longer. This morning I felt a little less exhausted and I didn’t have a headache. You will also be pleased to learn that my diarrhoea has stopped. I’m now fervently hoping that I am coming to the end of my cold turkey from opioids that began on Christmas Day.

It’s certainly made me realise how strong and dangerous these drugs are. Their great capability is that they interrupt and alter our perceptions of pain in our body. Opioids do this much more effectively than any other class of drugs. So when you are coming off them, your perceptions of your body seem to remain distorted. I felt agitated and unable to find a comfortable position in bed, however much I tried. I very much hope I have come down fully now and am back in touch with normality again. I certainly feel pretty worn out from it all.

One positive of becoming partly nocturnal is that I have been getting through my Xmas books at a great rate. I devoured TS Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats early one night and went on to The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel. This is a great piece of nature writing, set near the area I grew up in, which gave me great tugs of recognition as he spoke about local landscapes and landmarks. I moved on to a journal and handbook of Stoic philosophy, which was most appropriate and very useful. The only one I didn’t start was Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. Oddly enough this might have been the most appropriate for the peculiar half-waking and half-sleeping state I was in each night.   

Our New Year has also been without phone or internet. This is not a dramatic resolution to detox ourselves from the modern world. Storm Dylan on New Year’s Eve did the initial damage and this was compounded by Eleanor, whose winds roared just as threateningly as Ophelia. Along with plenty of branches from the trees that form a hedge along one side of the garden, the phone line was brought down. We are waiting for an engineer to come and fix it. Not having a landline is not difficult when you also have mobiles, but the lack of the internet is a big problem. I have been watching TV news, but it is very uninformative, even the supposedly detailed BBC News Channel. And of course there is the lack of contact with friends and family through email and social media. I do not have a smartphone and would only check these from time to time each day via my computer. Missing a day or two is manageable but any longer gets extremely difficult as so much communication is now only electronic.

This morning I got a text from BT Openreach telling me that engineer Ryan would be attending to our  job today. We waited and waited. He arrived at 4.15 and set about it. He checked our internal cables through the house and in the roof-space using a tester and a strange little sensor that could detect where the cables were under the loft insulation. He climbed up the gable end of the house and attached one end of a new external cable. He then went to the telegraph pole at the end of the garden and attached it there. He completed most of the outside work in the dark by the light of a head-torch. At 5.30 we were connected again. He said he shouldn’t have been doing the outside work after dark, but he wanted to get the job finished today. I said that’s well beyond the call of duty, thank you Ryan. He smiled and said his name was Stan. Our repair job had been reallocated. Well done Stan.