I didn’t sleep well last night. Or rather, I didn’t sleep long. I slept hard, but only six hours. Then I couldn’t sleep any longer. Normally, I wouldn’t be surprised by that because that’s how much I used to sleep before going to the hospital. Since I got out of the hospital, however, I’ve been sleeping eight hours a night. Very surprising! Well, not really, given the narcotics, sedatives, and antibiotics I was hopped up on. They were some very powerful drugs and they didn’t exit my system completely until I was home for two-and-a-half weeks.
Afterwards, I still was able to mostly sleep eight hours a night, only waking up once or two. In the last few days, however, my sleep has been spotty. I think it’s because I’m detoxing from the parental visit. I had a hard time falling asleep last nigh t and I woke up early.
I had three emails from my mother waiting for me when I got up, which did not improve my mood. My parents had to quarantine for fourteen days in a hotel upon returning to Taiwan–which means they have very little to do. Which means my mother can email me several times a day. Which is annoying, in case you can’t tell from my terse sentences.
Here’s the thing about abuse. It’s difficult to tell how deleterious it is while it’s still ongoing. It’s terrible, yes, but it becomes normal when it’s continuous. I mean, that’s just the way life works. Even the most unusual event, positive or negative, becomes normal when it continues to happen or enough time has passed from the time it happened. Take, for example, my recent medical trauma. It’s not every day you suffer from pneumonia, two cardiac arrests, and a stroke, and live to tell the tale.
Side Note: I was reading an advice column and a writer wrote in that her mother had suffered a stroke. It was tangential to the actual issue, but the advice columnist said that having to have someone care for you after a stoke is common. That hit me hard for some reason. I mean, it’s common sense and it’s not as if I didn’t know it before. But seeing it in print drove home the fact of how lucky I was to survive two cardiac arrests and a stroke with almost no damage. Seriously. I’ve gotten the clean bill of health from both my cardiologist and my neurologist–which is incredible.