Monday 6 August 2018

Falling

I got off lightly. Two weeks for new glasses; on my left hip there is a bump, like another, smaller hip; and it's entirely possible that by this time tomorrow I'll be able to raise my left arm above my head with just the mildest trace of pain. Falling and landing hard makes you timid and since Friday I've felt hesitant and frightened in the doing of a variety of things I would normally do with unthinking confidence. That'll be gone soon, too.

I rode to work today, saw my doctor this afternoon and went to yoga this evening and I'm feeling the benefit of all of that. I needed to talk to my doctor about what the experience of falling asleep has become since I began to take the sleeping pills she prescribed for me. Going to sleep feels like something is being done to me, something which I have little role in and no power over, and which happens so quickly and completely that I can't resist it. And it feels like it might be a kind of ecstasy, this giving of myself up to oblivion: but it's accomplished and over so quickly that I'm never able to catch and fix enough of the experience to really be sure what it is that happens to me. No doubt this is coloured by my understanding of how the medication works. But I know this feeling is not entirely down to my imagination, in retrospect constructing an experience of nightly loss of consciousness that is always, to a greater or lesser extent, violently blissful.

Saturday night was a case in point. I was still really sore, so I ran another very hot bath and poured into it the now usual decoction of lavender oil, epsom salts, honey and oats. I took my sleeping pill, and on the little footstool by the bath I set out some books, a sliced-up pear and a glass with two fingers of whisky. Too much. I read the books, ate the pear and drank all the whisky, and I soon began to feel that I had to sleep. I got out of the bath and dried myself and brushed my teeth. I was hot, drowsy, flushed; I felt soft and pliable; my face and neck were damp, either from bathwater or from sweat, and tendrils of hair stuck to my skin. I got into bed, closed my eyes and I saw a tsunami of sleep rush towards me, and crash on me and bleed through me from the bottom to the top, bearing my unconscious body upward.




4 comments:

JahTeh said...

I love those nights when sleep wins the fight and I'm down for the count before I hit the pillow. Unfortunately my mind seems to be stuck on two hours sleep, pee and repeat but that first two hours is pure bliss.

Horrible to hear of that fall, something I do frequently and I'm not even on a bike. Promise all who love your blog, never get on a motor bike. I see the gloves are getting cleaner, perhaps it's a sign of Spring.

ernmalleyscat said...

I like how whisky is measured in fingers (two seems to be popular) and the assumed allowance for difference in holding capacity between those with slim or beefy fingers.

Lucytartan said...

I promise I won’t ever get in a motorbike. In hard boiled fiction they measure whisky in fifths. Fifths of what?

ernmalleyscat said...

I think it might be fifths of a gallon, whatever that equates to in cubits, but I'd like to think it's fifths of a fist ie. fingers.