Day 151
There is a muse of sleep, and she and I have gone beyond our usual separation and are now discussing divorce. I am the injured party in this instance - it is she who has left me, the cow. No amount of wooing seems capable of bringing her back. I have tried everything the books and my friends suggest but to no avail. In desperation I cheated on her last night with a young pretender called Tamazepam. Please God this is not the start of a long affair, that is the last thing I want.
When I was young (ie. before I had kids and my body went doolally) she and I had the most marvellous and intimate relationship, laying in bed for ten hours at a stretch, completely entwined, hardly moving, getting up each morning refreshed and enriched by the encounter. Such love. The thought never entered my head that one day our time together would be difficult, fleeting, restless, shallow, constantly interrupted, or altogether destroyed.
I have been walking around for weeks now, in that broken-down daze. I crawl to the sofa where I have not the concentration to do anything but watch TV, eat what is to hand, and sometimes knit. To add insult to injury I keep chancing across programmes full of new year zeal, about fat people who only sit on the sofa, watch TV and eat. Last night I watched Rosalind Russell storming through 'Gypsy' and singing about how she didn't ever want to be someone who sat at home and knitted. I feel I have been deserted and am now under attack.
My hormone cream usually helps me get to sleep by making me drowsy and lethargic, which is why I only apply it at night. Steve bought a new brand this month in an effort to save money - it had the same ingredients in the same quantities so we thought that it would be OK. Not so. I had the most horrendous reaction to it - something I've never experienced before. Because I was using it in conjunction with other things, Valerian for example, it took a while to identify it as the culprit.
What I experienced was a strange sort of discomfort in my limbs, but mostly my legs. I believe it's called Restless Leg Syndrome. The emotional feeling that accompanies it is of someone scratching their nails down a blackboard inside your head - constantly. All the time you want to move your legs in order to find a position where they are comfortable enough to allow you to sleep, and this is hard to do. They sort of ache everywhere you put them and the tension can be quite unbearable.
The other night I was completely exhausted but unable to sleep, and had run out of Valerian, so I put on a double dose of the cream. The leg thing was so bad it took me about three hours to get to sleep and when I did, I carried on dreaming that it was happening and increasing in intensity, spreading to my arms and hands as well. I woke up sobbing and hysterical, having to hit my arms and hands over and over to desensitise them enough to calm the feeling down. Steve bathed them with cold flannels for me, which helped a little, but I swore I'd never put that cream on again, having realised that it was the problem.
I was shattered the next day, and then that night I didn't sleep until five in the morning. Not good. So last night I took a sleeping pill and am now dozey and foggy ( I can't tell you how many spelling mistakes I've had to correct today, but it's into treble figures), and fairly useless. I am emphatically not a pill popper, and refuse to spend my life on drugs to get me to sleep each night. My body is out of balance enough for that to be a good idea.
So what to do - how to broker a reconciliation with the muse?
If you find out before me - let me know, ok?
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