June 19th - blog 1 - sleeplessness

What a dreadful, dreadful night. It feels like I was awake every hour to two hours and tossing/turning in discomfort. The weather raged and the wind and rain were torrential. I was about to say I wonder what nights’ sleep are related to and why the days don’t seem to correlate with the nights. But then I already know this information, its just the easiest thing to forget when sleep and nighttimes seem so connected to the day that we have just lived, despite absolutely not being. The fact that they are entirely unrelated and that sleep is more likely to be dominated by everything not-self the more self you have been in a day – well that’s worth remembering always.

So last night I felt I could not get comfortable. I wonder if I changed my pillows – they certainly don’t feel right. But I was so tired (and to a large extent, and abnormally for me) I still am. I never usually carry over yesterdays’ tiredness through a bad night to still being tired the following morning. And I’m sure I will rally, but I also need to be mindful of my energy levels and more cautious when moving around because it is in tiredness that carelessness causes accidents.

I also worked out a large part of what my tension was about yesterday. Mary – in the bed opposite. She was having a hard day and difficult mental and physical problems emerged from that, including a panicking, shaking thing which was making me tense. Her family also served to further add to the weirdness, They are strange people – the daughter especially, wit h little or no real personalities and clothes/makeup and attitude from a really dark period in the seventies! I think there’s an odd dynamic there but the only problem arises when it impacts on me and my space – which it threatens to do at times given the proximity and the overbearing-ness of closed curtains and a nurse or doctor every five minutes. I think the stress was largely Mary’s though – she was feeling sick and then not recognising when she had been to the toilet until the nurses came to clean her up. Its just unpleasant and not nice to be against.

But then today is the focus now, tired as I am and scratchy as I was att times yesrerday. Today is Dr Gordon, I hope, and the important clarification of the next step and the future progression to give me more confidence in the now and under the present regime. I don’t feel as if I’ve put on weight since Tuesday, although I hope to God I’m wrong. I must be wrong, actually – there’s not a lot of reason why I can’t have. It just doesn’t feel as unequivocal as Tuesday’s weight in terms of confidence that I’d gained weight. Nevertheless tomorrow’s weight will tell me more. I don’t know what to say about weight gain factors, a lot is dependent on the actual figures tomorrow. I thin it must be expressed to all tomorrow that I want to be moving onwards to food as swiftly as possible so I can naturalise the weight-gain in nutrition, not supplementation. I think that pointing out that it doesn’t pay me or benefit me to become accustomed physically to gaining weight in ‘artificial’ sustenance when the whole idea is to be reintroduced to a food regime and then incorporate enough into that to gain weight. That is ultimately my goal and hwat I want.

Therefore it just remains for me to continue doing what I am doing. I think perhaps my snacks can be built upon in confidence – both with the information about my future but also after my acclimatisation to what it is like to have these fluids inside me. If I do take my time and drink them a little slower I feel less full and last night did alter my perspective to witness that I am lucky that they are drinks and don’t fill me up as much as a meal might, certainly as much as a meal might now with the unfamiliarity of it. Because I have been aware of their calorific content I have been almost filled up by logically knowing how much I’d just eaten and whilst this has been relevant as I have reintroduced bulkiness into my eating regime it is starting to not be such a big deal within me and around me. It doesn’t matter to me either that I snack throughout the evening or afternoon if its more convenient. I hope that they have no reason to criticise tomorrow and yet for some reason I am worried that they might. I have done absolutely nothing wrong calorifically within this diet. If anything is at fault it is the diet itself…why am I setting myself up for a failure? Well…because you can guarantee that when the weight gain was to the tune of almost a kilo which was subsequently ignored, you can bet your bottom dollar if the weight gain does not continue in that order the ‘almost a kilo’ figure will be noticed and used against me to challenge my progress – if you see what I mean.

And I think this is part of my problem with observation, Natasha and Dr Gordon and some of the nurses. I sense that rather than wanting the best for me, they want the best for them. And also I sense sometimes that their fear or their ignorance, their prejudices and stereotyping, their lack of education and simply their general attitude means that all too often they are against me. It feels like the opposite of a 5^th line’s positive projection. They are always too willing to criticise first that the complements are never there. The first port of call is to pinpoint where I might be failing or resisting because that is what they are looking for. It means that my intentions, my hopes, my aspirations and my assertions are all too often lost and left by the wayside in their narrowed focus on seeing the one occasion when I resisted something or the few things that may be perceived to be out-of-ordinary. In this way they complete miss the majority of my expression.

Going back to my tendency to take any misinterpretation of my expression and impression as my own responsibility. I’ve just seen another aspect which makes my behaviour not at fault within the perspectives they take of me. It is their focus which sees certain things and misinterprets – and because they only see very narrowly they add their narrowed perspectives up and compile a picture. But it is the negativity in their approach which establishes their view, not the positivity in my demeanour. At the end of the day this is a hospital and bizarre as it seems they are far more used to doom and gloom, to failure and struggle than to health and to patients actually getting better. More often than not on this ward they are patched up and shipped off. None of them that I have seen have performed miraculous healings and recovery. Hospitals may be places where people turn corners, but they are always discharged before they have staged full recoveries and healings. As such these are not places of the ultimate positivity potentially available in wellness – they are dominated by deaths and the worst stages of illness. As soon as someone is through these stages they are discharged into the community. So they are tuned to and looking for the bad, the negative, the ill and the dire – and are all too likely to see it if that is what they want and, lets face it, are trained to see…

…I wonder if my book is about that – pain and hospitals. I think the title is ‘Cancer Would Have Been Easy’. Perhaps it’s a semi-autobiographical account of the torture of being ill without an enemy to perceptibly fight and the mental pain of being told that it is your mind at fault, the physical pain of undiagnosed trauma and the emotional pain of constant disbelief and negative attitudes from those who are supposed to love you. Compared with this, compared with ignorance, compared with imperceptible, subterraneous illnesses – well, Cancer Would Have Been Easy.

Quite how its framed, I don’t know. But it’s a start of a something that needs expression – and the insights I have into the operation of the NHS and their handling of me (coupled with researching how they handle cancer patients) may just form an incredibly insightful and fascinating novel. Anyway, I’m awake and more alert now – seeing about my snacks, my weight and that the reason behind my resistance to these people who surround me is because of the vision with which they approach. It all helps me relax more and hopefully continue to emit my truth, regardless of what comes towards me.