Nineteen
When I was a kid, my mum would push the bedside drawers against the bed to act as a barrier because I tended to roll out. I eventually outgrew that, but it was a sign of the sleeping troubles I would always have. In my twenties, I had bad insomnia. I grew tolerant to sleeping tablets. My GP tried a range of other medications where drowsiness was a side effect. For a while, I had success with an antihistamine, but once I grew used to those I went back to (one set of) sleeping tablets and briefly grew addicted. The thing with the sleeping tablets is I liked the way…
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I was diagnosed with sleep apnoea several years ago. In the simplest terms, sleep apnoea is when you stop breathing, so your brain panics and startles you awake just enough to get everything going again. Because this is happening, you never settle into a deep, restorative sleep, so when you awake you feel tired, even if you’ve slept eight hours. To give you an overview of its seriousness, when I was in hospital with a broken leg, a nurse woke me around 3.00am because she said I didn’t appear to be breathing. On another occasion, after I was wheeled back to my bed following surgery, a nurse said she was…