To sleep, to dream… Ay, there’s the rub

It’s a strange but, I suppose, understandable contradiction that you go to hospital to recover from illness, and they stop you from getting a decent night’s sleep, which would surely help… Since I’ve been having folinic acid (to reduce the side effects of the high-dose methotrexate), I’ve had to be woken up at 1, 4 and 7 in the morning for those doses (and the timing’s very important). I’ve also been almost constantly on IV hydration, so often a bag runs out during the night, the pump starts beeping and it needs to be replaced. And of course observations still happen at 2am and 6am, though fortunately the nurses have mostly tried to combine them with the folinic acid (because the exact timing of obs isn’t so important). Still, I’ve very seldom even had a couple of hours of unbroken sleep, and usually when I’ve been awoken for the next drugs/fluids I’ve immediately felt awake enough to be fairly certain I hadn’t been in a very deep sleep. Usually some kind of light needs to be turned on – though again the nurses are generally very good at trying to keep light, noise and other disturbances to a minimum – so it does take me a while to get back to sleep. Having a bag of fluid pumped into your chest all night doesn’t really help with sleeping, either, particularly as it makes you need the loo more often, so all in all it’s tricky to get much sleep ’round these parts.

Luckily I’ve been allowed to lie in this weekend, so the best sleeping time has perhaps been in the morning when I should probably have been having my breakfast. Mmmmmm, Vegemite. I’ve occasionally dropped off during the day, though I’m a bit wary of sleeping too much in the day because then it’s even harder to sleep at night. I’ve always been a big fan of sleeping, and one of the many lovely things about going home the two times I’ve done so was being able to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep. Unfortunately the folinic acid is necessary, the hydration’s necessary, and it’s important to keep my observations going so that if I spike a temperature they can do something about it as soon as possible.

ZZZZzzzzzzzzzz