I toss awake. This is not a night for sleeping, it’s
a night to rise early, pace the house, glad and eager to escape the dream cycle that grows more real,
oppressive, and disturbing through each sleeping hour.
I’m at home. I am furious. My I phone has been corrupted by spam. The spammers have devised a way to
present their unwanted messages as new app icons, which appear on my I phone
screen. A new app appears, offering
me a chance to stay at a tropical paradise. A sad reflection in my life: I know how to remove unwanted apps
in my sleep: I hold the
I phone button down until the apps start to dance, then I click the
little black X that appears next to the double phantom application Icon.
Cyn
calls from the next room. She has news “ You have a new cancer” she tells me
“What?” I’ve passed the two year mark, I m free….
Right?
She
shakes her head. “The Farber called. I knew you’d be too upset to talk with them.
You have a new cancer, an incurable low grade lymphoma this time.”
I
wake in a sweat. Cyn sleeps quietly besides me. It’s 4:30. AM. I’ve been trying to sleep but can’t. I always have insomnia when I reduce my
prednisone dose. I now take four
mg of prednisone daily, My body responds apparently, by issuing a torment of
pre- dawn cortisol, firing a pre dawn flight or flight response that soaks into
my REM.
A Gordon light foot lyric springs
to mind
Searching
through the fragments of my dream shattered sleep
1975 never speaks so loud as it does through half forgotten
song lyrics.
I
know the dream’s meaning. I
recently ran into X, a young woman fighting cancer. Her prognosis isn’t as hopeful
as mine. We spoke and the sad,
unsaid conversation was, “ You lucky bastard .You beat the big C” I felt guilty
then, feel guilty now. Survivor’s guilt,
to be sure, based on the fact I may live to see my grandchildren, but X may not see her young children reach adulthood.
It
isn’t fair. It’s not fair. In a
world of a just deity, the old farts with grown kids die, the young parents live.
We all have the same destiny, we all meet the hooded guy schlepping the scythe.
We live so the young people in our lives can lie
snug and safe and secure in their beds, knowing somebody loves them, they’ll be
there to play catch, make dinner and speak soothingly when the car comes home
with a mangled fender.
I
atone for my ruddy good health through my dreams. That’s why I sit here at 4:56
AM, unable to sleep. I’m back at
work these days, putting in eight hour shifts I’ve devised a work plan: Don’t work more than 8 hires a day, don’t see more than two
patients an hour, take an extra day off a week, and avoid carbs during the day.
Eating bread triggers my adrenals to produce cortisol, which provokes my pancreas
to produce insulin, which causes my sugar to drop. That’s when the weak
crankiness hits.
Alas,
I haven’t devised a work- around for the four AM dreams. Yet.
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