Good news, bad news, sad news in 2020s

Not at all surprisingly, I’m back to being tired. It has nothing to do with sleep apnea or the CPAP, though. Try estrogen instead. I started using more because it stopped increasing my PVCs. Last night really sucked because I was not only up forever, but I kept waking up like every half hour to an hour. I just couldn’t stay asleep for long. My first thought when I woke up was that I was overmedicated, although I didn’t feel overmedicated otherwise. That’s when it hit me, and I did a little digging and found that estrogen can cause insomnia and frequent awakenings. Definitely time to cut that back again. Fucking hormones, too. They really suck.

So, while Fitbit notices my fragmented sleep to a degree, the CPAP’s app doesn’t. It just looks for apneas. Again, I got a score of 97, and therapy has cut the events in half, but I still have a way to go. Still have mixed apneas, but the CSA is low enough not to be a concern. This time I ramped up to 9.8. Rampings are no longer waking me up, but I still sometimes open my mouth. Hopefully, just like I learned to sleep through the rampings, I’ll sleep through that too.

I swear, though, my sleep is cursed no matter what I do! I feared that if this helped, whatever’s cursing it would find a workaround—and barely three nights in, it has. On top of the estro, we’re going to have a few days with the potential for storms to wake me up as I start sleeping in. I swear it’s like something wants to slowly kill me off through my sleep. No matter what I do, there’s always something. Was it worth all the money if I’m just going to have my sleep disturbed in all these different ways?

I was able to nap for a couple of hours, but it didn’t do much for me, maybe because I napped without my gear. I moved the CPAP from the shelf behind my head to the nightstand and let the hose dangle between the nightstand and the bed in hopes of there being less to get tangled up in. So other than opening my mouth a few times here and there and wrestling with the hose, as Tom said, I could be in compliance easily with the way things are going so far.

Might have to get a heated hose at some point, because if it’s cold at this time of year, it might be more noticeable in the winter, even if the winters here are short. I might also get a different strap that lowers the bottom strap so the nasal pillow doesn’t tug up on the bottom of your nose as much.

I wasn’t too happy to find that my blood sugar, which I tested this morning for the first time in a while, is still in the triple digits at 107. Let’s just say I have a feeling my A1C isn’t going to get any lower, or at least not much lower. The question is whether or not it’s going to rise. I hope not, since I just can’t tolerate medication.

The water was off again yesterday for an hour or two. We figured that because the pipe broke on a weekend, they just put a temporary patch on it and fixed it properly the next day. Really hope that doesn’t get to be a regular thing like it was in the last park, and I don’t have to go back to being afraid to shower during the daytime.

Not much change with commercial planes, but I swear there have been way more small planes lately, and they’re really annoying as fuck—even late at night. The low-pitch drone and the fact that they fly lower make them harder to drown out with air cleaners and things like that. I really hope I’m not going to have to live with this for the rest of my life because this is another thing I’m obviously never going to get used to. The areas we may consider moving to should be far enough away that any commercials flying over us would be too high to hear. But nowadays, small planes may be an issue no matter where you go. If we could cut them back to five a day instead of a dozen, however, that would be good. Sonic booms would be my biggest concern out in the boonies. That’s still way in the future, if it ever happens.

I had some very vivid dreams. During the five hours that I slept, I dreamed we were living in the house my mother’s brother had when I was a kid with his first wife and two snotty daughters. Only the backyard didn’t look like it really does. There was an ocean or a huge lake nearby. I must have been able to keep a schedule because I was a student somewhere, studying something. But one night, I was unable to sleep, so I wandered out back where Tom was asleep on a chaise lounge. That’s where he preferred to sleep, lol. I sat on another lounge chair and gazed off into the water where the moon was setting, casting a really cool-looking rippling reflection on the water.

Eventually, I got back up and went into the house. When I found I was still unable to sleep, I thought that due to having an impeccable attendance record, it wouldn’t hurt to take a day off from classes. So I walked into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet, and looked at the wall straight across from me, wondering why they ever blocked what used to be a second doorway there.

Later on, when I napped, I had a vivid dream, also taking place at night. We were living in what looked like a huge barn-type house that was three stories and easily 5,000 square feet. There was a large rectangular quarry in front of it. One night, I went out to a shed nestled at the edge of this very secluded woodsy place to see what Tom was up to and thought it was weird that he even needed a shed, given how huge the house was.

Then I had another dream where I was crying. Someone came up to me and asked what was wrong, and I told them it was the day Aly died. When I woke up, I realized that it really is the day she died four years ago. I hadn’t forgotten, but I had. Meaning that I hadn’t thought about it for a few days. But yeah, she’s now been gone for four years and I still miss the hell out of her.