Jay Lake: Writer

Contact Me Home
>

Tip Jar:

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Feed

Recent Comments

Categories

[Cancer]

[cancer] Sleeping my life away

Yesterday, after sleeping ten hours the night before, [info]the_child and I went to Thanksgiving lunch with Mom and Dad. We came home and I slept almost three more hours, napping in my chair. After watching Edward Scissorhands, I went to bed and slept another eleven hours.

This is insane.

I’m not fighting it, just letting my body do what it wants, but this is a ludicrous amount of sleep. I’m not even taking any of the various soporific drugs right now. None of them are prescribed as sleep aids, but at least four of the drugs in my chemotherapy cocktail and suite of helpers have drowsiness or sleep as a side effect. This is my body in late stage FOLFIRI.

I’m beginning to wonder if I can stay awake enough to work the Day Jobbe next week, and more to the point, the week following after chemo session eleven. If ten to eleven hours per night is the new normal, away from the drugs, I’m going to have to start going to bed around 6 pm in order to have any hope of a functional workday the following morning. Which, well, I can do, but I am starting to feel very much oppressed by my sleep needs.

Crazy stuff. Meanwhile, no Black Friday for me! I am very thankful for that.

Be Sociable, Share!

Tags: , , ,

Posted: 9:36 am Fri November 25 2011 |

Where am I?

You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
Learn more here.

Share or Bookmark This

Consider adding this to one of the following social bookmarking sites.

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • JD Rhoades

    November 25th, 2011 at 10:36 am

    Your body knows what it needs to recover, and it needs rest.

    Reply

  • stevie

    November 25th, 2011 at 4:07 pm

    Jay
    It isn’t insane; strive to remember that bodies have minds of their own, and that consciousness is a luxury which your body will dispense with if it needs to.

    I recall you mentioning this some months ago, and I commented then that when my lungs become more than usually screwed up my sleep requirement escalates; the science on this is pretty straight forward.

    So you do what you have to do, and if going to bed at 6pm is what you have to do then it’s worth bearing in mind that it could be a great deal worse.

    For example you could be unable to sleep at all because of pain; that would also screw up your ability to do the Day Jobbe. Given a choice between too much sleep, and too much pain to sleep, I’d take the former. I’m pretty sure that you would too…

    Reply

Leave a Reply

« | »