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…
The Other Me
‘The Broken Road’ iv. I woke, groggy, in Recovery. A nurse told me I had a clicker in my hand for morphine. Then she wheeled my bed to my ward. It would’ve been early very early morning. I drifted in and out of sleep. The leg must’ve hurt, because come the morning they took the morphine clicker away as they said I’d used it too much – not that I remember using it at all. But things were going to be okay. Surely. Doctors did their morning rounds and came to talk to me. They pulled the sheet away from my leg. I expected to see a plaster cast. Uh…