I found myself doing something kinda ridiculous on a long weekend away last year.
I wrote about it at the time, but never got around to publishing it … and well, I don’t want all that time and energy to go to waste. So, here goes:
There I was, getting out of our mega-comfy hotel bed in the middle of the night to scrabble around the room in the dark, frantically looking for a spare blanket like a drug addict searches for their next fix.
Nothing massively weird about that, right? Wrong. Because the kind of crack I was desperate for, wasn’t extra warmth … it was a crack at sleeping on the mega hard floor.
So, ummm … why would I do that?!
Well, because sharing a bed with Pete is hard enough with my level of nocturnal hyper-vigilance, but sharing a hotel room as a family of four is just torture.
I mean, how the fuck do normal people sleep? Like, they just lie there, close their eyes, and BOOM. They’re asleep. What’s that all about?! And then there’s their sleep ‘behaviour’.
For example, one of our children breathes SO loudly in their sleep. To the point where, crammed into that hotel room, I feared their mouth might actually suck us all into some kind of Premier Inn vortex. I mean, how do they not wake themselves up like that?! I just don’t get it.
It’s so loud that even my custom made earplugs can’t block it out. So, I have to wear noise cancelling headphones over the top of said earplugs (rather uncomfortable, but needs must). And all the sleep medication in the world becomes as helpful as a chocolate teapot.
My sleep is also dependent on Pete channeling his ‘inner corpse’ (don’t worry, he’s not actually dead … just the romance). Every time he moves, my body wakes up with a jolt and an adrenaline rush that is so obscenely out of proportion to the offense. Honestly, Pete merely turning over in bed feels like I’m trying to sleep on a bouncy castle. Full of five-year-olds. High on Haribo. In Lapland.
The combination of the above then kickstarts the weird internal tremors I often experience at night. They’re fun. Because then I don’t know if it’s Pete making me feel like I’m bouncing all over the place – or whether it’s my Tremendous Tremors. (Ooh, that sounds like a fun Halloween opera. Albeit the reality is less fun. But I digress …)
Cue: my nervous system goes into fight or flight overdrive, and I become nauseous from sleep deprivation.
So, me, my nausea and my adrenaline are left wondering … COULD I get any sleep on the floor? What about setting up camp in the bath? I mean, anything has to be better than lying here awake, in a borderline-murderous state of sleep-deprived fury (it’s times like these I truly understand how some animals in the wild can actually eat their young … and their mates).
Hence, I’m forced into drastic measures.
And THAT’S how I found myself scrabbling around the hotel room in the dark looking for a way out of this nightmare.
Until I finally understood …
… there was no spare blanket in the room. This Premier Inn had failed me – deeply.
I therefore went back to bed and did what any normal sleep-scorned woman would do: I huffed and puffed LOUDLY, so everyone would know I wasn’t impressed with their shoddy sleeping behaviour.
Yeah. That’ll show em! 🤪
Does anyone else with ME/POTS suffer such brutal hyper-vigilance at night? What about the internal tremors?
