Perchance To Dream

Sleep. It seems to have become a luxury.

I am taking a combination of tablets for high blood pressure that have a known side effect of inducing fatigue. Sometimes I almost doze off at work, and when I get home at about 7pm the first thing I want to do is collapse on the sofa and shut my eyes.

But Rosemarie is usually genuinely thrilled to see me come home and I try to make the time special and enjoyable. There is no point in talking about her day because I usually know more about what she has been doing than she does, but soft low declarations of love and gentle humour go a long way towards making this time special.

Sometimes of course it goes spectacularly wrong. A lot of the time communication is impossible and how I react to Rosemarie's attempt to recount something to me is crucial. Eventually something will happen at some stage in the evening that produces upset and anger. After a long day at work I am not in the best place to deal with this.

Usually this does not last too long and by the time I am preparing a light supper we are friends again. We talk carefully and watch some television then Rosemarie is usually pretty tired and shortly after 10 is ready for bed. Sometimes I put on one of Rosemarie's favourite DVDs or recorded programmes and I can get some chores done, but I rarely get more than half an hour or so. By the time we have done tablets and night time stuff and Rosemarie is in bed it is about half ten to eleven.

This is when I get to pay bills, do filing, ironing and general tidying up and any other chores I have. I am also trying to keep other parts of my life going and I do work on some of the websites I maintain for myself and some friends, and continue developing my Photoshop skills and work on some of the many photos in my library. This can easily take until midnight or later. By the time I get to sleep it is usually about one o'clock.

Sometimes Rosemarie sleeps through the night but frequently she wakes about 5.30 and needs to use the toilet. She needs my help for this so I get up and take her. She tends to sleep fitfully after that, often getting into a pattern where she sits up in bed about every two minutes, then flops back. This makes it very difficult to get to sleep afterwards and my alarm goes off at 6.30. So most nights I get about five hours sleep if I am lucky.

It makes me feel tired just writing that.

This isn't working

I don't know why I thought I was going to have enough time to update this blog regularly and record daily details. It seemed a good idea at the time, but what I hadn't allowed for was how little private free time I was going to get. It's not so much that I don't want her reading over my shoulder (she wouldn't be able to read it anyway) but I prefer to spend time on these and get it right. For me that means rewrites and tweaking and requires peace and quiet and privacy. That sounds really pretentious and may not survive the first rewrite.

If I am honest I could probably manage my time a bit better but I have a lukewarm commitment to this blog because I doubt if anyone else reads it and I am not entirely sure how much of this I will want to read through in the future.

But my sister Margaret, has written a very good blog about her battle against cancer, and I was chatting to her at the annual Boxing Day family gathering. She said she found it cathartic and encouraged me. I haven't found this so far but we will see.

The other thing I found unexpectedly difficult was what to do about names. Do I use everyone's real name (Social Workers, Consultants etc.), or use mysterious initials, or just use their titles?

Details. Details.

Anyway, Christmas was good. We went to our daughter's new house and spent Christmas Day with her and her fiancé's family. Very nice people (most of whom we were meeting for the first time) who were kind and understanding and showed no sign of feeling awkward around Rosemarie. We stayed the night and spent most of Boxing Day there (my side of the family arrived). There was something deeply touching about being in an environment where there were so many warm, concerned, considerate and understanding people. I was quite overwhelmed. This is not to cast aspersions on the Day Centres Rosemarie goes to, whose staff are wonderful in my experience, but there is just something more intimate about a family gathering. Stupidly I thought it would be an imposition. I often find myself lecturing others on their duty to allow people to be wonderful, but I have a bad habit of not listening to myself.