Resting

The phone rang less than an hour after I had drifted off to a troubled sleep. There were three possibilities for people who owed me phone calls yet one pair from the list of three seems to have a sleep sensor hidden somewhere. I had missed a call the night before when I had been fully awake and ready because I forgot to carry the cordless phone with me. Well, I was right about who it was on the phone but I wasn't ready for unexpected good news. It seems that the recent bout of tension has come to an end.

I was so nervous watching Melissa on the phone that I fell off the bed. Thankfully, there is still carpet in that part of the room. Melissa is very good. I signaled to her that I was fine but that I planned on staying right there for a while and she nodded without saying anything out of the ordinary. Normally, I can hear both sides of a phone conversation unless I'm on the other side of a room but she was too close to a fan for me. I could hear just enough to pick out the voices of both my parents but not anything that was said. All I could tell is that Melissa's face was very relaxed.

I don't believe in luck or fate or anything like that but I do feel that it is too early to say anything specific about what was said. Let's just refer to my parenthetical header from the previous post and say that tensions are reduced. I had felt as if someone turned on a hotplate beneath my behind a few weeks ago and yesterday's conversation turned it off. I wanted to celebrate. More than that, I wanted to feel good but my body betrayed me. All I was able to do was sit down with a book and let Maddie the cat nap me.

She napped me for more than ten hours yet I was still tired when Melissa came home from work. It's obvious that I need a few days of significant sleep before I'll even know how I feel. That's feel in the physical sense. How much of my recent physical decline was brought on by the stress from the flood and what followed? There had been a long stretch of bad weather before that. Am I going to come out of this capable of living the life I have been planning? It's quite possible that I've never been this tired before.

I slept for a night and a day sitting up in a chair with Maddie holding me hostage. She allowed me a few bathroom breaks but that was it. Any side trips earned me an angry meow and my eyes kept trying to close on me. After staying up for a few hours after almost 24 hours unconscious, my body reacted in a way I should have expected but didn't. Expected or not, it has still been some of the worst pain I've ever felt. My nerves decided that my pain for the day would be toothaches. Don't get me wrong. I do not deny having untreated cavities that react very badly sometimes to what I'm eating. This was different. It was like someone sounded a starter gun and the extreme right side of my mouth exploded in pain.

I tried treating the pain with generic Oragel which was marginally effective until the pain came back. Experience told me that I had to brush my teeth and get the first coat of the stuff off before a second coat would do any good. This got me through the day with a couple of repetitions. I slept even more until shortly after Melissa came home from a night shift and asked why I didn't just go to bed. I had no good answer. I tend to get no sleep at all or twelve hours minimum from which I awaken congested enough to start gagging when I sleep in bed.

Thankfully, the congestion issue has improved since the pain doc's office found that my sleep apnea had improved to almost nothing. Since the congestion was coming from the mask, it isn't as bad now. I decided to go sleep in bed except that something new happened when I tried. The pain snuck up on me again except that it was both sides of my mouth. Pick your four teeth furthest toward the back and picture them bursting into pure pain. At the same time, the muscles that hold my neck up felt strained, swollen and very painful. I used to believe that they were swollen lymph nodes. There was no way to lie down and sleep in that much pain. The annoying thing is that lying down to sleep was the only way to make the pain better.

What I need is 8-12 hours of good sleep lying down in bed for a few days in a row. Melissa's next night shift seems like the perfect chance. I tend to sleep during those because I get bored and lonely enough to avoid getting cases of the frantics. Overall, I'm not worried. This is all the sort of thing that happens to me when I'm coming down from a period of great stress. Up until yesterday, I had failed to get a solid night or day's sleep in 4-5 consecutive weeks running. That may be a new record in the literal sense for me. I am pleased that there were no fatalities around me.

The pain actually got worse after so much sleeping in a chair so I went to bed. Ten hours of sleep in a bed left me feeling awful upon waking. It wasn't the usual congestion. The intense pain was very much like I had spent the entire time asleep with my jaw clenched in severe tension. This is awful beyond what I thought was awful before that. Now, it's raining five hours or so later and I feel marginally better. Having been through a day of this, it's hard to imagine having written that I would be okay after a few days of it yet I suspect it is the truth.

The good news is that it seems to have stopped getting worse for the time being. The bad news is that Blogger is NOT cooperating!