It’s 1:30am. My mother is still asleep. She woke up enough to get under the covers, but that’s it. Fingers remain fully crossed. My alarm is set. My CPAP machine is plugged in and the tank is full of distilled water. I think I’m good to go to sleep.
Wish me luck.
Last night was okay. My brother told me that my mother had slept most of the day so I was a little nervous that she’d be up all night, struggling with back and leg pain. Nope. She went to bed not long after her 8pm meds and slept most of the way through the night. I was ready for sleep around 10, but ended up staying awake until 11. I woke up to go to the bathroom a bit before 5:00am and ended up sitting up for half an hour before trying to sleep again. All together I got about 6.5 hours of sleep, and that’s pretty good for a night on Mom and Dad’s two-seater.
I did manage to watch this week’s Handmaid’s Tale this morning before work. So the misery porn show switches gears and gives us a tear jerker that at the last minute morphs into something really dark and scary. In other words, a pretty friggin’ great episode. Again.
Okay, it’s 9:00am now and I am signed in to work. Let’s get this day rolling, shall we?
Every time I do this I tell myself to write it down somewhere and then I never do.
I got a delivery of supplies for my CPAP machine this week and today was the day I put the new parts on.
The only thing I didn’t replace was the water tank. That will happen next time.
There, I wrote it down.
It’s five minutes passed 4:00 which means I have less than an hour and a half to go for today’s work day. 85 minutes to quittin’ time.
I took Tuesday off for the drive to Vermont, and I took an hour yesterday morning for the hospital conference call. These two events have had the unintended side effect of turning my internal calendar inside out and upside down. I have no idea what day it is. At varying times during the day yesterday I was convinced that it was Monday. Other times I was equally convinced that it was Friday. It was Wednesday. What chance does that give me?
I have had my Google Calendar open all day today and it clearly shows that today is Thursday, yet I have been positive that it’s Friday. I had to mess with the Nana Sitting schedule for the weekend too, and that’s going to mess me up even more. Instead of leaving after work on Thursday and coming back after dinner on Saturday, I am going to leave on Thursday and come back after work on Friday. The reason behind it is excellent (happy birthday to Bellana) but it’s messing with my head.
It’s been a wacky week, I tells ya. I’m hoping I have the energy to play some guitar tonight. If I put the leads on one of the May songs tonight I can mix it while I Nana Sit tomorrow.
Back to work. 75 minutes to go. I just got asked to evaluate a custom code project for one of our customers and it’s something I’ve already written. Kick ass, dude. I love it when that happens. Reusing code is totally where it’s at.
Talk to you later. Probably after I get home. Probably with a picture of the cat. Rock on, ladies and germs.
I went to bed a little before midnight last night with my alarm set for 6:00. I woke up before it went off and couldn’t fall back to sleep. I had the CPAP machine on the whole time. I figured it would help, but I was still a 6.5 foot tall guy sleeping on a two seater couch and looking like a full sized person living on dollhouse furniture. How do my sleep numbers look?
Five hours and 25 minutes of sleep.
83% of that being restful! Holy Crap, that percentage is gigantic for me!
32% Heart Rate Dip! Holy Crap, that percentage is gigantic for me!
So I guess using the machine was a good move, for last night at least. The only downside is that I had to wait an hour before I could pack it up because that’s how long it takes to upload all of the data to the server. I can deal with that.
For some reason, I cannot get to the wordpress.com editor on my Vivaldi browser on my work laptop. I can do it if I open a private window and re-log in, but I can’t get to it from the main window. Weird. Maybe I’ll try logging out and logging back in again.
Sunday night television… one of the infuriating things about hate watching Fear the Walking Dead is that every once in a while they put out an episode that doesn’t suck ass. Last night’s was okay, assuming you ignore the idiotic coincidence of that character meeting that other character out of the blue. For the most part it wasn’t so bad. I almost wish it had been terrible. It’s like Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football. Uh.. uh.. we’re getting good again… here it comes… we’re getting good agai… Nope. Back to the same old awful.
Okay, it’s Monday morning. I have to finish packing up the stuff I had out last night that I don’t need during work, get my mother her 8:00am pills, and punch into work.
Have a good one, folks. May your Monday not blow chunks.
I got to my mother’s house around 6:30pm yesterday. My sister filled me in on how she’d been during the day and she was fine. No supplemental (physician approved) pain meds, no physical complaints beyond the norm. One little memory lapse, but that’s normal.
Shortly after my sister left to go home, my mother started complaining about pain. She got her regular pain meds at 8:00pm and I thought it would be okay from there. It takes a while to kick in, but once it does she’s usually all right for the night. Usually.
By 9:30 she’d had the physician approved supplemental pain med and it wasn’t helping. Her doctor told her that if the pain ever gets too much to sit in a hot shower and just let the water run over it. She did that last night and it did not help. There are two other physician approved, prescribed supplemental meds that she holds in reserve for bad nights. I thought I could tell which one she needed just by the way she was moving around, but she didn’t want it. She wanted my dad. I texted him around 10:00pm to see if he was still awake and he called almost immediately. They talked for a few minutes, which she said helped her even if it doesn’t help the pain (aww), and we decided to go with the other reserved, prescribed, physician approved med. Dad asked me to call back in 30 minutes to give an update.
For 29 minutes nothing changed. She was pacing around the house because sometimes the pain won’t let her sit still. Just as I was reaching for the phone though she went into her room, turned off the TV, closed the door, and got into bed. Hmmm… Dad called a minute later. She was still awake, but she was calm and seemed to be relaxed. A few minutes later I could hear her snoring a little. I told dad to go to sleep. I hope he did.
I, however, was freaked. Back when I was nana sitting on Friday nights, there were times when she was bad like this, but on those nights dad always came home. I had the experienced safety net. I didn’t have that last night. I sat in the living room in the chair closest to her bedroom door with at least one ear firmly focused on her.
She had conked out around 10:30. I didn’t lay down until about 12:30. I slept for an hour, woke up to go to the bathroom (because I’m old now and that’s what old people do). An hour later I woke up again. This time I saw that her bedroom door was open. She was asleep in bed, but I had clearly missed her getting up at some point. An hour later I woke up again. This time it was 3:30am. She was in the kitchen making breakfast. I got up and asked her if she knew what time it was. She did. She said that she had been asleep since 8:00 so getting up a bit before 4:00 was normal. I told her she didn’t go to sleep at 8:00, she went to sleep at 10:30 and was having a really bad night. She said that didn’t happen.
She sat at the dining room table to eat her breakfast and I sat in the living room listening. After half an hour or so she was sound asleep at the table. I didn’t wake her up. I can’t imagine it was comfortable, but she clearly needed to sleep and I wasn’t going to interrupt. It was after 4:00am by then. My alarm was set for 6:00. I goosed it up to 6:45 and went to sleep. I woke up around 5:30 for a minute or two, long enough to see that Mom was back in bed sound asleep, then woke up again around 6:15 and I’ve been up ever since.
She gets her next round of pills at 8:00am. 15 minutes from now. I really don’t want to wake her up, but there’s pain meds in the morning batch and I don’t want her to miss them.
Happy Friday morning, everyone!
Note: If you didn’t figure it out by the post above, all of the medications she takes are prescribed, and all of the medication delivery plans we follow came from the doctors who prescribed said medications. We aren’t making this shit up on our own.
I brought the CPAP machine with me. It’s in its case…
I think I’m afraid to use it though. My mother has been having a really bad night. She finally fell asleep a little while ago, but I’m afraid if I use the machine, the background noise it makes plus the deeper sleep it brings I won’t hear her if she wakes up.
Catch 22, yeah?
I didn’t want to do it, but I’ve made a command decision. From now on, when I stay at my parents house I am taking the CPAP machine with me. If I’m only going to get three hours of sleep at least it will be decent sleep. Part of avoiding it was because I didn’t want to lug a jug (hehe, lug a jug, that rhymes) of distilled water back and forth. So I filled up the tank and then dumped it into a water bottle. I’ll take one night’s worth of water at a time. Ugh.
I’m doing it, damn it.
I am staying at my parents house every third night. Last night was one of those nights. I’m sort of seeing a trend. I can’t sleep well here. I know I would sleep better if I brought my CPAP machine, and I am going to have to start doing that, but that’s not the issue.
The issue is falling asleep. Another issue is staying asleep. There have been a few nights now where my watch tells me I got less than four hours. Sometimes it’s because I go to bed at a decent hour, wake up a couple hours later, and then can’t get back to sleep. Other times I just can’t fall asleep to begin with.
The last time I was here was Friday night and it definitely fell into the latter category. I was trying to sleep around midnight but I was still awake around 3:00am. Then I was up before 7:00. Saturday and Sunday nights I slept great, at home, but all day Monday I was still really tired. Last night I did okay. I fell asleep around 10:00pm, my mother was already asleep which helps, but I woke up again around midnight. I eventually fell asleep but I woke up again a few more times and finally stopped trying to sleep around 5:00am. My watch tells me I got six hours. My body tells me that’s about right.
I should be bringing the CPAP machine. The only reason I don’t is because it’s a pain in the ass to break down and set up and the idea of doing that two out of every three days just pisses me right off. It’s probably worth it. I just don’t wanna.
On a mostly unrelated note, last night I decided to explore the Netflix looking for something to watch. Somehow I hit on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Not the original show, note the Comedy Central show, not the SciFi channel show, but the recent Netflix show. I had only watched a couple of episodes. They were good. I just never got around to watching more. Something on the list of episodes grabbed me though.
Ator.
In the long history of MST3K there are a few movies that stand out as being so much worse than the norm that they become legendary. One of my personal favorites is a little classic called Cave Dwellers. Back in the old days my MST3K watching friends and I learned that Cave Dwellers was a sequel. The first movie was called Ator, the Fighting Eagle. You don’t actually need to watch the first movie to follow the second because there is a flashback in the second movie that literally shows every noteworthy “plot” point from the first.
I had never seen Ator, the Fighting Eagle and I always wondered why MST3K didn’t do an episode on it. Well now I know they actually have, and I watched it, and it was TERRIBLE. Our heroes tore that turkey to shreds in glorious fashion. I was sitting in the living room watching it on my computer with headphones on all by my lonesome and there were a bunch of moments when I literally laughed out loud.
Tip of the hat for the self referential riff where they made a joke out of the “how much keeffe is in this film? Miles O’Keeffe” line from Cave Dwellers. While the episode was wonderful, it was still nowhere near the original. Cave Dwellers is worth it for things like, “stupid rock. Stupid, stupid rock” and Joel singing “Ator, Ator my sweet friend.”
As I get older I sometimes forget how much fun terrible, awful, what-were-they-thinking, movies can be.
It’s almost midnight. I’m still awake. I’m about to curl up on the love seat in my parents living room and try to get some sleep.
The Bruins won tonight. The Red Sox won too. Nice. I didn’t watch either of them. I watched a couple of episodes of Supergirl. I’m not feeling that show anymore. Didn’t last season either. Probably a good thing it’s ending.
I should probably wrap it up and go to sleep. My iPad’s battery is down to 28%. There’s a part of me that wants to stay up until it gets to zero, but I’ve got a busy day tomorrow and should really get some rest.
Okay, going to bed. G’night, all.
Inside the Red Head's Head 