For whatever reason, today is a blah kind of day. I had a rough sleep night, which…I’m worried. Before I ended up in the hospital, i had shitty sleep. I was legendary for it, honestly. When I was in college, I got four hours a night and was barely functioning. With Taiji, I inched my way to more sleep. Better sleep was debateable, but it was certainly more. Before I ended up in the hospital, I was up to 6 1/2 hours a night. But.
Here’s the thing. I’ve always been a night owl. The time I feel most awake and productive is between 12 a.m. and 2 a.m. It used to be even later, but I’ve been trying to hold it down to 2 a.m. as my bedtime. I’ll get to that in a second.
Even as a child, I never went to bed before midnight. My mother would put me to bed at eight or whatever, and I would stuff a t-shirt under my door so I could read until midnight. Reading was my escape from a brutal world that had no place for me.I was an alien in an alien world, and I wanted out.
It didn’t help that there was something really wrong with me. When I was fourteen, My mother took me to the doctor because there was obviously something wrong with me–but we were not sure what. I had a resting pulse of over a hundred. Plus, I was depressed as fuck, but that was not part of the physical problem. It turned out that I had Graves’ Disease. Back then, it was not understood well. I had to take nine pills three times a day, which meant twenty-seven pills in total. I had to get my blood drawn every month, which not fun. I have terrible veins, and the phlebotomists missed with astounding consistency. This was in the days before the butterfly needle, so it was basically being poked in the elbow over and over and over again. There was one guy who insisted that he was great in finding veins. He was not. he missed, but refused to take out the needle. He kept wiggling it in my arm, saying that he would find my vein. Meanwhile, I felt as if I had a hot poker jabbing me from inside my arm, and the pain almost made me pass out.
I have one vein that is passable. It’s in the crook of my left elbow. It’s the one that I always offer to phlebotomists when they needed to take my blood. Most of the time, they accepted my offer and tried to take my blood from that spot. Once in a while, they took a look and said they wanted to see the other elbow. I would show them my rigt elbow even though I knew it was futile. Yes, my left elbow is bad, but the rigt one is even worse.