March 14, 2008

• Rough Day Yesterday

  Last night was the third night in a row that I have gone short on sleep.  That’s probably not enough to bring on serious consequences from sleep deprivation, since I don’t plan to sign any contracts, operate heavy machinery, undertake electrical work or roof repairs, etc.  In fact, I’m hoping that getting up around my usual time today, after having only a couple of hours’ sleep, will help me get my diurnal cycles back into sync with my time zone.

  Fatigue-induced sleep disturbances are old familiar symptoms.  It’s comforting, even.  For the first time in a long time, respiratory problems are not the predominant symptom.  Almost anything is easier to live with than not being able to catch my breath.

  I guess I have adequate reasons for being fatigued.  Tuesday night, I was up until after 4 Wednesday morning, watching Lance Mackey win the Iditarod, but didn’t sleep in — that “too tired to sleep” thing that happens with M.E.  Next night, the wee small hours just slipped up on me while I was sitting in bed reading, and I had to get up early yesterday to prepare for a trip to the clinic.

  Greyfox had a dental appointment, and I had to see my doc sometime, so we coordinated our appointments and he drove up here, arriving with barely enough time to offload the frozen and perishable supplies he’d brought.  Then we went on up to Sunshine Clinic.

  I was handling the trip okay, even managed to walk into the clinic under my own power.  Not having to be wheeled in was a biggie for me.  I was doing fine, actually, right up until the doc decided she needed for me to do a spirometry test to establish a baseline for my chart.  She left, and I sat there wondering whether I should duck out quickly to empty my bladder, but I sat wondering too long.

  There were some thumps and bumps, the exam room door swung part way open, shut again, and then after more bumps and some muttering, it opened and the doc’s young helper stumbled in with a bigger-than-a-breadbox and obviously weighty device under one arm, trailing an electrical cord, and a tool caddy like I use in the garden precariously balanced on the other forearm, freeing that hand for the doorknob.

  As she plugged it in, she expressed the hope that it would work, and the opinion that it was a dinosaur.  It worked.  Three times, I had to take in a big breath, then let it out quickly and keep trying to force out air that wasn’t in there, for a duration of six seconds each time.  By the end of that ordeal, I was weak-kneed and my nail beds were blue.  They could have gone with the first one, because, as she pointed out, my performance was consistent and the three different colored tracings, red, blue and black, overlapped along almost identical curves.

  She left.  I waited a few minutes for the doc to return, then threaded my wobbly way through the maze of corridors to the rest room (that’s the washroom, for you Canadians), took a wrong turn on my way back, and ended up doing more walking than I’d done in a single day since… oh, probably since August, because it was early September when I got pneumonia.

  When the doc finally got done with me and I tottered out to the waiting room, Greyfox rose and came to meet me at the reception desk, saying I’d been gone so long he was half expecting someone to come out and tell him I’d died.  The clerk, who was sitting behind the desk waiting as I wrote a check, gave a nervous little laugh, impelling Greyfox and me into a little bit of guerrilla theater.

  I said, “Well, you know I’ve been having trouble breathing….”  He acknowledged that, and I continued: “Guess what they had me doing.”

  His guess was “running,” so I went on and said, “breathing.”  Then I pantomimed the big deep breaths and forcing out more and more air after all the air was gone, hanging onto the edge of the desk, straining.  Then I went back to checkwriting and said, “By the time I’d done that third forced expiration, I thought I was…” and he joined me as we, deadpan and in unison, said, “going to expire.”

  In the car, as he backed out and headed for the highway, we discussed how the topic of death gets to normal people.  He said what I’ve heard him say before, that it’s living that’s hard, dying is the easy part… “been there, done that, got the karma.”

  We were in sync and in harmony on the way back here.  At one point, I reached over and patted his thigh and he turned and gave me such a loving look… then recovered his wits and swerved back into his lane.

  He and Doug finished unloading supplies, then loaded up empty water jugs and made two trips to the spring while I fixed a quick lunch.  After lunch and “torturing the dog:”  confining Koji to his tether so that he couldn’t get into the middle of our farewell hug, he was back on the road again, on his way down to Wasilla, his cabin, and his cats.

  Doug got involved in his thrice-weekly D&D session immediately, and later in the day when I was hungry, I nuked something that was just sitting there, part of the clutter of supplies that hadn’t been put away yet, I thought.  I discovered my error when Doug scolded me for eating the thing he had set aside for himself.

  Then Greyfox phoned after nine, when we get into that extra block of off-peak cell minutes he buys each month so we have some time to maintain our marriage, and I confessed that I had forgotten to have him add cat kibble to the shopping list.  This means that either I find some way to get it close to home (unlikely, and expensive if I do), or he’ll need to make an extra trip up here in a week or two when the current supply runs out.  I got scolded again for that because it’s time consuming and takes almost a tank of gas, then scolded by Doug again when our phone conversation lasted over an hour and Doug missed the end of his RPG session.

  It all came out okay in the end.  Before we ended the call, Greyfox told me how much he had enjoyed our time together, and I said, “Me, too.  Maybe we could get together again soon,” and he said,  “Yeah… I gotta transcend that economic insecurity bullshit.”  Then Doug forgave me, cooked burgers for both of us, and said the session had just about been wrapped up before the break anyway.  But the whole thing, the entire day, not just the scoldings and my guilt and chagrin, but the forced expirations, the long walks, the short sleep… it exhausted me.

  Today is a day of rest, so that I’ll be able to sleep tonight.  All I need to do is keep feeding wood into the fire until Doug wakes up.  It was blessedly warm yesterday for my outing, but it went subzero again last night.

  I’m outta here now, back to my bed and a book.  Seeya later.

  

  • 3:30 pm
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