Sleep...or Rather No SLEEP

3 Months ago I had the perfect sleeping pattern.  I typically went to bed between 9pm and 10pm and fell asleep rather easily.  Of course then I was waking at least 3-4 times a night to tinkle (that was most annoying) but I often was easily able to go back to sleep.  When the sun would come up around 5am I would often awake a little, but then I would get up to tinkle again, put on my eye patch thingy and go back to sleep until 6:15am when I would get up and get ready for the day!  I loved that I woke early and went to bed early and felt well rested

...But then SOMETHING HAPPENED...

I hate talk about this, because I sound like an old lady, but I'm pretty sure this is the culprit, given the fact that all of my older friends and my mom talk about their INSOMNIA...

FORCED MENOPAUSE

Just writing the words makes me have that look on my face when I smell a dirty diaper of one of my nieces and nephews.

I've never talked about IT, because I have a hard time accepting IT...

IT being a hysterectomy at age 36...So not right...So not fair...So wrong...

IT makes me feel like half of my womanhood is gone.  The thing that makes us different from the male species is GONE.  And was gone in moments, before I was allowed to accept it and morn something that was't going to be there ever again.  The thing that should offer us the opportunity to bear a child, the thing every women should experience and that comes up in conversations of every female gatherings, something I'll never have the opportunity to experience in this life.  GONE FOREVER!

BUT...it has made it so that I can't sleep.  This cancer patient can't sleep!  Isn't that what cancer patients do?  NOPE, NOT ME!  I don't even nap, like normal cancer patient's do, (except for 2 days after chemo, but then I have an excuse and drugs that make me sleep).  But then again, I'm not an ordinary cancer patient.  So annoying I tell you.  I still go to bed between 9pm and 10pm.  AND THEN I THINK...mostly I think about how my diagnosis played out and how I can't believe it happened the way it did and I think about it over and over again.  I make lists in my mind, when really I should just get up and write them down.  I listen to music, but then when it is over I think, I should be sleeping by now, given I just listened to an hours worth of music.  Last night I tried to go to sleep without music, didn't work.

I usually have to get up around 12am to empty Hank (Nick named him) my lovely ileostomy bag that makes me crazy (definitely for another post).  Finally last night at 12am I took a fourth of an Ambian.  I hate to admit that I gave into the drug, but I had to.  The worst part of not being able to sleep at night is that I sleep until 9am or 10am.  Maybe this is the cancer patient part, but I hate it.  I feel like I have wasted my day. By the time I eat breakfast and waste time on the computer half my morning is gone without accomplishing much of anything.

So what is the answer my friends?  Just stay up reading until I am so tired I have to put the book down, get up and blog (which I have done), take a sleeping pill every night at 9 so that I'm asleep by 10:30?  Or just grin and bear it?  Probably the later...