Noun: insomnia

Habitual sleeplessness; inability to sleep.

 

The trouble with treatment for The Cancer is that it is long.  The steroids that you are given alongside your chemotherapy will make you feel wide awake.  Depending on the dose, this can go on for days, until the ‘chemo coma’ happens, your off-button is pressed and you lose the ability to string a sentence together.

 

And your poor body just gets up off its knees and starts healing itself and you go and give it another bloody great dose of steroids and chemo, and the whole miserable cycle starts over again.

 

Although tired for much of the time, sleep seems to elude you.  You might drop off for an hour or two at night, but then spend 4 or 5 hours wide awake and staring at the ceiling.  I used to call these periods ‘The Big Awake’.  It was almost like I had forgotten how to sleep for more than an hour at a time.

 

I found 2 ways to deal with The Big Awake. 

1.  Listen to an audio book.  I’m not usually a fan of these, but I found listening to someone read to me did often make me drop off eventually.  It’s a bit annoying as you miss big chunks of the book and you have to keep rewinding it and trying to remember where you lost consciousness, but if you listen to an easy-reader, it won’t really matter.

2. Give up trying.  Get up.  Make a cuppa, stick the telly on.  Do some ironing, empty the dishwasher, bake a cake.  Be warned that the family do get a bit pissed off if you start hoovering or decide to use this time to start learning how to play the drums.  You’re going to be tired tomorrow anyway, so don’t worry that you only got 3 hours sleep tonight.

 

If you weren’t prone to insomnia before The Cancer, you will remember how to sleep for the whole night again eventually.  The Big Awakes become Little Awakes, and before long they are just middle-aged ‘Get up for a Pee Awakes’.  At least, you hope you remember to get up for those…