Mind Fog

In the last week I have reach a new level of tiredness like nothing I've yet experienced - though of course we have a habit of forgetting just how awful past experiences were at the time. I seem to have accumulated a (quality of) sleep debt that I suspect can be measured on the same scale as the national budget deficit. Worse, it seems to have entered some kind of positive feedback loop, meaning that I'm so tired that for some reason I'm beyond being able to sleep.

For sometime now, but most noticably during the last few weeks, the moment that my head touches the pillow my mind seems to snap wide awake. I end up struggling to get to sleep for hours on end, drifting backwards and forwards from dozey wakefulness to light but very dreamy and unrestful sleep. My mind essentially doesn't know the difference between one state and the other.

This is difficult to explain, but in normal life during difficult or stressful periods when I go to bed my mind has the habit of naturally polarizing itself towards whatever problem is current. If I don't manage this properly, as I approach the point of falling asleep, my mind will spiral off towards thinking about the most extreme consequences of the problem at hand and, more or less literally, a shock current of fear will jump through my mind/body, instantly returning me to full wakefulness again. If this cycle repeats more than two or three times the chance of me falling to sleep tends towards zero and a very long night ensues.

Over the years I have developed various mental tactics to combat this problem, all of which centre around setting my mind to thinking about something stronger and nicer than the problem at hand. For instance, thoughts of flying, aerobatics or skiing have long been mental antidotes to the daily problems of running a high tech startup and the fine financial balancing act that that entails. More recently Marion and I got our yacht sailing licenses and sailed with the kids around the Greek islands for a week. The idea of at some point in the future being able to buy a nice 45ft sailing boat and having the time to throw an anchor overboard in some quiet bay has fended off many a dark bedtime thought.

But the last months have been so difficult that I have run my store of nice, powerful antidote thoughts entirely dry. Also, at the moment there is so little to look forward to in our future. We have to live our lives day by day, so thinking about doing something nice is about as useful as making plans for First Contact with Aliens. I've stopped flying & aerobatics, we missed out on skiing last season and there's no chance that we'll be able to go sailing this season. Family life has been watered down such that I get to see Marion for about 30 mins per day and Natasha every other day just before she goes to bed. Apart from seeing Nattie, being at home is not very useful, except to get a change of clothes. There's no time to do anything at home and there's nothing to do at the hospital either. (I should add at this point that Lauren has recently taken to phoning more often and of having something to say when she does phone, which is quite nice).

The result of all this is that when I go to bed there's nothing in my head that I can use to fight off the furies-of-darkness. I have then resorted to the simple tactic of staying awake until I'm absolutely exhausted in the hope that when I put my head on the pillow I will blink out before the furies have time to gather themselves. This tactic doesn't always work, but it does always guarantee that I don't get enough sleep. On the other hand, trying to catch up with the sleep deficit by going to bed early doesn't appeal either for the obvious reason: I'm afraid that if I go to bed too early it will give the furies plently of time get themselves organized and I'll end up taking a right old beating.

The last week or so has been some kind of hell in this respect and the only solution that I have found is a chemical one. My good friend Ron has been supplying me with some sleep-inducing tablets that one can get over-the-counter in the US. One of these plus a couple of melatonin tablets, which I use for dealing with jetlag, often, but not always, helps knock my mind into submission, allowing me to fall asleep. But I hate chemical solutions, they are artificial, lead nowhere and simply repress the underlying problem rather than help solve it. So sometimes I get bloodyminded and refuse to take a tablet just to show that I don't really need it, most often to discover that actually I do.

Last night was a case in point. I was completely mentally exhausted when I got to the hospital. Let me try and explain what that feels like: firstly it feels as if my head is stuffed with wool. There's a kind of pressure on the inside of my skull that feels as if its having the effect of slowing down my thoughts. My short term memory doesn't work very well, I'm having to take notes about stuff constantly or rely on someone else's memory. My medium/long term memory seems to operate in slow motion: I'm perfectly aware that I know something but I feel like I'm stood in a queue at the library waiting for the given fact or thought to be stamped with a return date and handed out. This leads to a difficulty to concentrate. I can break through the concentration problem to some extent just by mental determination - work is pretty damned interesting at the moment, which is an incentive. This is how I get through the day at office. It's different when I'm at home or the hospital, it's much more difficult to find the mental reserves to break through the concentration barrier, not least because it takes quite a lot of energy.

But the worst thing is a constant feeling of dizziness that varies only in degree. When I got to hospital last night I felt dizzy standing on my feet with my eyes open. Now, sitting down and supposedly being more 'rested', if I close my eyes I start to feel dizzy. If I have a bad night, I wake up in the morning feeling dizzy, with the room washing around like I woke up in my imaginary yacht in a medium sea. I've taken to lying in bed until this feeling largely passes, which means I'm getting up rather late at the moment.

Back to last night, the problem with being so tired is that I don't feel like doing anything. This just makes the current stay in hospital pass even more slowly. I'm too tired to read these days, I'm fed up with computers, impatient with rubbish TV and therefore just plain bored and Irritable (capital intended). I'm filling in my time playing Suduko puzzles on my iPad, but even that is starting to become rather jaded as my foggy brain isn't prepared to or capable of absorb(ing) the tactics needed to solve more difficult puzzles and the less difficult ones I can now knock off in a few minutes.

So I thought I'd pass the time by watching the England match. Ha, what a bunch of cowboys. I was sat there trying to recall every single word I could that would describe their play: "pathetic" was the first to spring to mind (though nothing actually "springs" in my mind at the moment). Anyway, I gave up trying to entertain myself and went to bed around 11pm. The moment that my head touched the pillow my mind went into overdrive. I knew instantly that I wasn't going to sleep properly. My mind meandered around from one thing to another. I kind of knew when I started "sleeping" since the flow of thought passed from a stream of real things to a stream of unreal or absurd things. But equally it passed just as easily back again. And as it came back I would remember the unreal stream of thought and realise that maybe I'd just been vaguely asleep. At the same time I remained aware of what was going on in Kay's room. If someone walked in I was instantly awake.

An hour and half passed like this until Kay complained of feeling sick and eventually was sick. It was 1.30am when she was settled again and again I tried to sleep. The same thing happened. I tried a new tactic: listening to an audio book, normally guaranteed to put me to sleep if I'm not driving the car. But no good, I'm now hooked on a David Hewson novel.

Around 4am I gave up and dug out one of Ron's tablets. Around 4.30am I guess that I fell asleep properly. But I woke up at 7:15, as usual, feeling just indescribably dreadful. I refused to move until 8:30 when the day nurse came in, needing to reinstall Kay's NG tube. As a result I have been feeling pretty damned awful all day. I have left the parent camp-bed out and have been lounging around, trying to rest. But that's barely possible here during the day.

This evening we had planned for Marion & Nattie to come over. I was looking forward to spending an evening with them and, with a little luck, the three of us sleeping in the McD house. But Marion just phoned to say that Nattie is having huge fun at an end-of-hockey-season competition and party and doesn't want to leave it. Nattie needs to have some fun, so fair enough. But I guess that that leaves me on my own with a sleeping Kay for yet another night.

You have no idea how much I'm looking forward to it.