Noise!

I don’t know that this will help with the woodchipping monster when it happens next time, but maybe it will help me get to sleep earlier: SimplyNoise, a noise masking website. I’m also eager to try it in the office to see if it can counteract the infernal buzzing, humming, roaring and whirring of office machinery. Try the pink noise with the oscillator. It seems soothing to me.

How do they know?

Lately, every time I walk into the office at work, I start sneezing. This isn’t too surprising, given my tendency toward allergic reactions. I have been mostly trying to ignore it, given that every single allergy medicine does two things (1) stop working if you use it too often and (2) fuck you up somehow. So, I ask myself, can I possibly get anything done if I don’t take something? If I’m not sneezing constantly and dripping copious amounts of mucous on everything, like some kind of particularly off-putting movie monster, then I prefer to just struggle through. Last Wednesday, though, was movie monster day so I dipped into my arsenal of pills. Yay! My face stopped swelling! Boo! I ended up with insomnia, completely unable to sleep until 5:30 am. And then, not sleep well. At least I work second shift, right? So I don’t have to be up until late morning.

Except that Thursday morning, at 8:10 am, I was then awoken by the unwelcome sound of a woodchipper being fed the tremendous pile of dead trees and branches they pile up across the street. It shook through the walls. It vibrated the floor. It screamed through my bones. I put in ear plugs. I moved into a different, further room. I put my head right next to the high velocity fan over which I can’t ever hear the TV.

There was no salvation.

It only lasted 40 minutes, and then they were gone and the world was quiet again.

Not that that helped me any, because I still had insomnia and couldn’t return to sleep easily. It isn’t like this is the first time, either. And every single time, it is always after a night I spent struggling to get any sleep at all. Why? Why? Why do work crews do this? Why must they do the noisiest activity of their day first thing? Why can’t they at least wait until nine? And how is it that they manage to do this only when I haven’t slept?

Grrrrr. Visions of Fargo danced in my head.

In which I finally make what is probably an obvious connection

The past several days have been absolutely miserable. There was a joint in my body that wasn’t complaining, and quite loudly, too. And I was nauseous. I was inflamed. You’d think the nausea would have clued me in, but I am stubbornly dense. Anyway, pain. Of the beaten to a pulp by giants and then rolled over by heavy machinery that won’t get off me sort. I only have Darvocet for pain relief, because this bad of pain this much all over isn’t an everyday thing, for which I am thankful. And even really bad pain can be ignored to an extent if I can stay distracted. Being distracted, though, is impossible when one wants to sleep.

Monday night, I finally realized that my head was also hurting, that someone was coming along every few moments and wailing on the right side of my skull, sending my eye shooting out the socket. Well, it felt that way. And that is when it dawned on me that maybe I ought to take a Zomig. It worked marvellously well. I actually fell asleep within an hour and slept through the night.

So. Hmmm. Now I’m thinking that my crapped out neck maybe leads to the migraines, and the migraines magnify every other distress in my body. It also helps that the pressure front that was bearing down finally broke into actual storm. However, since I can’t command the weather, I will instead follow up on this migraine-joint pain connection.

Insomnia

It’s 1 AM. Every damn joint hurts. I dislocated a pinky trying to get up from my chair. Why did I think it was unnecessary to get splints for my pinkies? (Note to self: Next go-round on replacement splints, get pinkies armored.) It’s a good thing there is a backspace key, because I am having quite a time of it trying to hit the right letters with enough force to make the keyboard work but not much that I dislocate the other fingers and half the time I hit the wrong letter or hit a letter and nothing happens. I really hate that–expending force to no effect other than my own discomfort. It makes me feel like I am out of phase with this dimension, going through the motions of a human body, but unable to have any proper impact on my physical surroundings. I should go take something so I can go back to sleep, but that would mean that I’d have to get up again and I’m not sure I have the will to face that again. Oh, and my muscles are spasming.

On the bright side, I’m in a good mood. I don’t remember when the last time was that I slept through the night, but at least I’ve gotten four to six hours of sleep every night the past couple weeks. Beats the hell out of the previous two weeks, in which I was going 24 and 48 hour without sleep, and then maybe crashing for the usual four hours.

I’ve had a nice week all in all, even making gluten-free bread twice! And my kitchen is relatively clean despite it. I realize this is why I am aching so much. Standing to cook is exhausting, and my kitchen is not very me-friendly and can’t be made to be so. So I over-extended myself this way (bwah ha ha. Sorry. EDS joke). And a friend is coming over tomorrow to help me clean house.

I’m currently reading Oliver Sack’s Migraine. I’m taking an historical approach to it as an artifact of attitudes toward invisible disability. He wrote it back in the paleolithic era of 1968 and his revision was in 1992, so I have to keep in mind that he is representing the best in medical thought at the time. Otherwise, his depiction of migraine, as well as epilepsy, as partly psychogenetic would have me screaming in anger so loudly you wouldn’t need me to blog to know how I feel about that attitude.

So. Will returning to my reading help me sleep? Or will it just get me riled up? Perhaps I should just fire up Joost and look for the most boring program they have available. There is one show that I know will always put me to sleep, but, alas, I don’t know its name, and I am sure it isn’t on Joost. It’s about the Nazi fire bombing of London. While the subject is interesting, the presentation consists of a lot of flame images and sounds, with a soothing, even narration of the sort normally employed to quiet small children. If anyone knows what it is, and where I can get a DVD, I’d appreciate it. Sleep on demand will be mine at last!