It’s 3am. I’m lying in bed and for the life of me I simply can’t sleep. I suppose it doesn’t help that around 3am is when the air pressure changes either, but nevermind, it’s customary to sleep at night, – or so I’m told!
It’s not that I’m not tired, cause I am, I’m really tired and all I want to do is sleep. I’m not excited, nothing is happening tomorrow and nothing is on my mind. The only thing that is stopping me sleep is this damn pain and of course, the symptoms that go with it.
I lie with my eyes closed, I’m lying on my back and can feel the egyptian cotton bedclothes and my silky nighshirt touching my skin. The bed is fairly warm, but not as warm where legs are or my arms, they’re always cold to touch you see. The mattress is beautifully comfortable yet supportive. Sounds like the perfect situation, right? Wrong! The bedclothes feel so heavy against my skin, not only that but the fibres feel like white-hot barbed wires, pressing hard against my skin, making my skin blister, burn and itch with pain. The gentle, supportive pressure from the mattress feels like a hard stone block with billions of tiny pebbles, though surprisingly it’s the most comfortable thing that I can find to sit on. The fibres of my nightshirt are, if possible, worse than the white hot, barbed wire covers. Worse still, there are a thousand little people from the book, “Gullivers Travels” who seem to have come to life, leaped out of the book and are consistantly stabbing me with objects so tiny they’re invisible and so sharp they penitrate my skin to the bone. I have spasm after spasm, burn after burn, stab after stab.
Finally I fall asleep. The pain doesn’t stop, the little people don’t stop stabbing me and I could swear that barbed wire is getting hotter! Despite being asleep I moan and cry with the pain and the sensations that I shouldn’t be feeling at all. I wake up every hour at least once and stare at the clock beside my bed, pleading with my disobedient body for a few hours of real sleep.
Morning comes and I’m as exhaused as when I went to bed last night. My legs and arms hurt so much and I can feel the dried tears on my cheeks. I know that my arms and legs are there, somwhere, after all they hurt enough, but ask me where they were and I really couldn’t say. I couldn’t even tell you which position they were in.
And once again, it’s the begining of the day….