In the Before Times (before hospital, that is. Not before COVID. It’s funny how the latter has gone from huge in my mind to almost an afterthought. That’s not this post, though, so I’ll leave it there for now), I was very much an all-or-nothing person. Well, let’s back that up even further. Before I took taiji, I bought into the idea of ‘no pain, no gain’. Kind of. I didn’t believe that when it came to physical pain, but pushing myself mentally/emotionally? Yeah, I did that on the regular. I didn’t push my body as much, but that was only because I was lazy. I did mess with my sleep quite a bit, but that was because my sleep sucked. I wasn’t doing it on purpose; in fact, I was trying to make it better. But that did mean I didn’t sleep much or well on most nights, which contributed to my body feeling like shit.
When I was in the hospital, sleep was hard to come by because they took my vitals every four hours or so. Despite that, I was zonked out hard whenever I did manage to fall asleep. I had powerful sedation medication and narcotics coursing through my veins so I’m sure that’s part of the reason I was able to sleep so much in the hospital.
It has continued now that I’m home, however. The most shocking part is that I’m in bed by 10 p.m., 10:30 p.m. at the latest and up by 6 a.m. I get a solid 7 1/2 to 8 hours a night, only waking up once to pee. This is unheard of for me, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth. At first, I was unnerved by my sleeping schedule, but the early morning is a lot like the late, late evening if I squint. Nobody is up and it’s dark outside. There is a chill in the still air and it’s as if I’m the only person awake in the world. Mentally, I still prefer going to bed at this time than getting up, but I’ll take what I can get.
It’s funny, though, how quickly the brain can adapt something into being the norm. I’ve struggled with sleep issues all my life and now, they’re gone in the blink of an eye. Now, it’s just normal for me, and I rarely think about it. It’s the same with, well, the whole experience. I woke up from nothingness, mad, disoriented, and scared. My brother explained everything to me (along with the docs, of course, but I mostly remember my brother’s explanation) and once I absorbed the news, I rarely thought about it again. Or rather, when I did think about it, it was more in the vein of, “Huh. That’s a thing that happened to me.”
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