Beauty Sleep

I am a diva when it comes to my sleep. I certainly didn't start out as a diva, it has kind of evolved over time. I have always been a relatively light sleeper. Thunderstorms, fire sirens, hoot owls all could wake me up as a child. I'd get up in the morning and ask my Dad where the fire was the previous night, and neither he nor mom had heard the fire siren. I would hear it, and also hear the fire trucks leaving town and could tell if they headed north towards Petersburgh or south towards Cherry Plain. I remember one time as a teenager we had a very bad thunderstorm in the middle of the night. I got scared (yes, thunderstorms scare me), and picked up my blankets and pillows and went into my sister's room. I curled up on her floor and slept, and the next morning, everyone wondered why I was in her room. They hadn't even heard the thunderstorm.

Looking back, I have no idea how I survived four years of college- or more specifically, four years of trying to sleep in a dorm. I know I took naps a lot. I remember being tired even back in high school. I would come home from school, take a nap, and then go to my part time job. In college, I napped a lot. I still nap. Each day I come home for lunch, and after I've eaten my lunch, I take a 10-20 minute power nap. It recharges my battery enough that I can get through the afternoon. When I don't get my nap, I struggle to get through the rest of the day.

People with Fibro do not sleep well. Many of us do not get the restful deep sleep that we need. Most nights, I could sleep for 12 hours and wake up feeling exhausted, like I hadn't slept at all. The restful sleep is the 'repair' time for our bodies. My body doesn't go through that repair stage. Even when I am so tired I can barely move, I suffer from insomnia. Once I get in my bed, I lie awake for at least a couple of hours. Some nights I have fallen asleep on the couch, and yet the insomnia still kicks in. Then there are the trips to the restroom. My mind thinks of that day at work, or the next day at work. I think of projects I am working on, things I need to do. I make lists in my head. I think of blog entries. My brain has no 'off' switch. I try to be upstairs in my bed by 11pm, and most mornings for work I get up at 7:20am. In that 8 hour time frame, I sleep in fits and shifts. On a good night, I will get 5 or 6 hours of sleep. Not continuous- I roll over and wake up several times a night. On a really bad night, I may only get 30 minutes of sleep over the course of the 8 hours.

As I learned more about Fibro, and how to live with it, I put more thought into my sleep environment. I bought room darkening curtains for the three windows in my bedroom. I already had a great pillowtop mattress. Erich says it's too soft and my mom says it's too high. But it's just right for me! I sleep in the middle of my queen sized bed-this gives me plenty of room to roll over without falling out of bed. I keep my room cold. My room is above the garage, so it is always colder in the winter. Then I have a rotating fan I turn on to make it colder. For the summer, we bought a portable air conditioner for my room, and I sleep with that running.

Careful thought went into the linens for my bed. I do not like the feel of regular sheets, so I have the t-shirt sheets. It feels like sleeping on an old worn t-shirt. Very soft. I have two blankets. In the summer, the bottom blanket is a waffle weave cotton blanket, and in the winter it is a soft fleece. The top blanket is a Biederlack blanket I've had for about 13 years. I love Biederlack blankets, they are soft and warm and snuggly. I was so sad to learn the company went out of business in the past couple of years. My Biederlack blanket has teddy bears on it. It keeps me warmer in winter and oddly enough, this same blanket keeps me cool in summer. I love the softness against my face. The blankets are topped by a comforter, but that is more for decorative purposes. The comforter is nothing special, it has a woodland cottage scene on it (which includes bears and moose). The material isn't all that appealing to touch, but on the coldest of nights, I appreciate the bulk.

Then of course, there are pillows. After I started getting allergy injections, I felt like I couldn't breathe if I slept flat on my back. So I propped myself up with several pillows. I currently have three pillows of varying firmness to prop up my upper body. The pillow I actually sleep on is a contoured memory foam pillow which cradles my head. That makes a total of four pillows. Sometimes, I feel like a princess surrounded by her cloud of pillows.

To top off all of this, I also have a body pillow with a soft fleece cover. There are days the Fibro pain is so bad, I cannot stand the feeling of my fingers touching each other, or the bones in my legs hurt when I lie on my side, with one leg on top of the other. On those days, I need something to cushion the bones. The body pillow is wonderful for that. It also gives me something to hold on the nights that pain is ravaging my body. It is comforting.

Everything about my bed is comforting. Or it is meant to be comforting. I assure you, there is nothing comforting on the nights that I cannot sleep, the nights when I reset the sleep timer on the TV for another hour, and then another, and then there's nothing left on TV to watch, and I'm still awake. And then I realize I have to be to work in 2 hours. Yeah, those nights my bed seems more like a prison.

Some people have told me to turn off the TV. I have to have the noise. Otherwise, I am alone with my thoughts, and that is even worse. At least with the TV, my mind has something to focus on.

The Fibro pain is made worse by poor sleep, but I don't get the deep sleep my body needs to heal the pain. Like many things with Fibro, it is a catch-22. I consider it a good night if the next morning, I know I fell asleep before the TV went off, but I don't remember hearing the TV turn off. What is a great night of sleep? Falling asleep and feeling like I've been asleep for days, then waking up and seeing that the clock says 2 or 3 or 4 am, and I realize I have several hours left to sleep. Then I pull the blankets up over my chin, snuggle into my nest of pillows and blankets, and fall back into a peaceful sleep until my alarm startles me awake. Those nights are a luxury. I always feel like Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind- the morning after Rhett carries her up the stairs. She wakes up stretching, surrounded by the best linens, at peace with the world. Of course, I didn't have Rhett Butler in bed, but for me, a good nights' sleep is just as satisfying.