Hi Everyone,
I’m not sure if I posted about our visit to Thomas Jefferson’s Sleep Study Center last week. As you know, Corey does not sleep through the night. Her latest medication addition has helped but she continues to have many fitful nights.
The center wired her for sleep and seizures. Corey handled the preparation well. She sat patiently for more than 45 minutes as her tech placed wires on her head, arms and legs. She jokingly asked me, “is this a good look for me”? I couldn’t resist responding, “I don’t know if it’s a good look for you but we’re going to get great radio reception tonight”!
I am looking forward to next tuesday when we have the follow-up visit to hear the results. Corinne has been visiting again and she’s decided sleep is highly over rated.
My novice research has found nearly all head-injured patients have some form of sleep disorder. This is confusing because people with head injuries can also have a fatigue disorder. You would think people with a fatigue disorder would want to sleep all the time or would sleep like rocks? Many have both problems.
Corey, of course, doesn’t fit any mold. She not only doesn’t sleep through the night, she doesn’t nap during the day and her memory loss has her convinced (with vehement debate) that she sleeps through the night. She has no memory of waking several times, violently screaming or saying ‘mean things’.
Between 1-5am, our house is more awake than it is during the day. She can hear the cats walking on the carpet!
“The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more.”
-Wilson Mizener
“People say, ‘I’m going to sleep now,’ as if it were nothing. But it’s really a bizarre activity. ‘For the next several hours, while the sun is gone, I’m going to become unconscious, temporarily losing command over everything I know and understand. When the sun returns, I will resume my life.’
If you didn’t know what sleep was, and you had only seen it in a science fiction movie, you would think it was weird and tell all your friends about the movie you’d seen.
They had these people, you know? And they would walk around all day and be OK? And then, once a day, usually after dark, they would lie down on these special platforms and become unconscious. They would stop functioning almost completely, except deep in their minds they would have adventures and experiences that were completely impossible in real life. As they lay there, completely vulnerable to their enemies, their only movements were to occasionally shift from one position to another; or, if one of the ‘mind adventures’ got too real, they would sit up and scream and be glad they weren’t unconscious anymore. Then they would drink a lot of coffee.’
So, next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you’re in a science fiction movie. And whisper, ‘The creature is regenerating itself.”
― George Carlin,
xoxo