Sleeps Like a Baby

I feel a bit like the dog that caught the car; I got your attention, and now I don’t know what to do with it.

Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely delighted to have an audience. Between now and the time that you lose interest, I will try and be as entertaining as possible. The one benefit of going down in flames is you make an amusing bonfire.

I didn’t sleep well last night.

Not that I ever sleep spectacularly well. When the kids were new, I was a targeted light sleeper--if the baby made even the slightest noise, shifted even a little in their bassinet, I was immediately and completely awake, ready to spring into action if the situation warranted. Anything else I was deaf to, be it cats messing around in the kitchen or fire alarm going off just above my head. Michael was the one that got up to check on the house noises; I was more of the “psst!! Did you hear that?!” variety.

Gabriel slept so poorly as an infant that when he did get on a more consistent routine, the cumulative exhaustion hit like an eighty-ton truck. We finally coaxed our way up to six hours a night most nights through a combination of calming sensory input and a cocktail of clonidine and melatonin, but by that time we had already gotten into the habit of maximizing sleep efficiency by falling asleep fast and hard everytime. If you are going to have one hour to run on for the day, you better make sure every second counts.

It is that almost that death-like slumber, a deep and dreamless time of nonexistence while your body frantically tries to keep you sedated so it can catch up on...whatever it does while you are sleeping.

I like to think of it as power saving mode on your computer: your brain has got too many tabs open, too many processes running. You can hear the fan whirring hard to cool it off, smell faintly burning plastic, feel the scorch of overexertion when you touch the base.

My sleep is the Blue Screen of Death.

The consistency of sleep is still an issue. I wish I could say that I get used to the luxury of a full night’s rest, but that is not true if for no other reason than my own anxiety. For the last nearly three years (three years on May 9th), I have gone into Emerald’s room to make sure she’s still breathing at least twice a night. Not because I am actually afraid something is going to happen in her sleep. The overnight hypoglycemia issue is admittedly scary, but only ever crops up when she is ill.

It is a comfort to my own mind though. Little reassurance routines that make me feel less anxious in certain situations. Like when I lock the car, I have to hold the keys in my hand so that I know for a fact that I did not lock my keys inside. Or upon locking the house, testing the door, then stopping the car so that I can physically see the closed and locked door before pulling away.

Doing those….is probably not the habit of a mentally healthy individual. Honestly, I have never claimed stability. But it helps keep me from panicking, wondering how I messed up and what damage it caused.

I know it is going to happen. It happens all the time, as a matter of fact, with far more frequency than I would like:

I mess up.

I miscalculate Emerald’s carbs and she ends up getting too much insulin for meal, causing her to drop too low before the next feeding time, forget her insulin when we go somewhere to eat. I neglect to give Gabe his afternoon medicine to calm him down, so he gets wild and dumps dinner all over the floor, or one of his many appointment’s time slips my mind. A hundred times a day in a hundred different ways, I drop the ball and end up suffering the consequences.

So, I partake in my neurotic little rituals--I have lists everywhere, all over the house that tell me exactly what I have and what I need and what I am supposed to be doing. If I have to go somewhere, I will arrive early or I will not be going at all; we need time to acclimate ourselves and figure out if this is a going to be a successful venture or if we need to bail. I triple check locks and hold my keys and give my mind something to hold onto, an anchor so that I can argue down that voice of anxiety that says, “Did you remember…”

At night, I patrol the house.

Gabriel still goes through his bouts of sleeplessness. If there is a full moon or he is getting sick or there is a cold front blowing in, he will likely fight off the sedative medications we give him. He gets up and wanders, turning on lights and vocalizing loudly, “ah-ah-ah-ah”. Crawling beneath the blankets with us, he will roll non-stop, cackling madly. He breaks the lock off the pantry, grabbing food that he throws on our faces to open for him, signing “more please. More eat”.

If he finds his iPad, he will crank it up to full volume and blast Sasha Baron Cohen as King Julian screeching “Madagascaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!” on a four-second loop over and over in the main hallway of the house, rousing all of us like a demented rooster.

While it can be annoying, we don’t really fault him for this. The developmental pediatrician told us that autistic individuals physically need less sleep than neurotypical individuals would. And if he is up, he’s not doing it on purpose; it is not like this is an active choice for him.

A week ago on Tuesday (April 12th), a storm blew into town. It has rained on and off since then, including today. For our household, it meant that Gaby slept less than a handful of hours Tuesday night through Monday; nearly a full week.

It is not all bad. It has given me much more time to write for the blog. There is a quiet, anticipatory peace in the middle of the night--that tonight might be bad, but tomorrow might be better.

And dawn is fast approaching.

--Andie