Insomnia Diary Entry One: The price I’m paying for going to bed at 9:29 p.m. last night is waking to strange dreams and observations at 1:29 a.m. this morning. As if that weren’t bad enough, my weaving room clock is four hours slow for some reason, so when I dragged myself in here to write down my strange dreams and observations, it said it was only 9:29 p.m. I feel like I slept zero minutes, not two-hundred-forty weird, totally off, minutes. What do I do now? Eat? Vomit? I hate waking up like this, being off like this. My ear wax is melting. The light from this pink Himalayan salt lamp is too bright. I think I need to hydrate.

Insomnia Diary Entry Two: Based on my symptoms, I’d say my TSH level is moving around wildly again and that it has been since I started a new dose of thyroid replacement and a new form of the medication, this time an amber liquid that burns my gums. My body no longer knows what to do, how to regulate, its TSH levels. Within a month’s time, I’ll swing from clinically hypothyroid to severely thyrotoxic. This has been happening every month for a year or so.

Heart palpitations are back. Big tears are back, rolling ones like dew drops on iris leaves in Kansas on any given spring morning. Nausea is back. Exhaustion. Word-finding issues.

I forgot my maternal grandmother’s first name two days ago. (It’s Ruth, a word I always see as red, like a ruby. Ruth, my gem of a grandmother, my red velvet cake grandmother, my faceted grandmother throwing off an eerie red light, my film noire grandmother if the lighting was black and red, not black and white. And she, Ruth, surely was all of those things. So how could I forget her name, given all the ways synesthesia allows me to vividly see it?)

I confused trammel and trample yesterday. (I didn’t just make that play on words in a post for fun. I actually forgot the difference between the words, then turned my language-related malady into a wry comment on nature and culture, or something like that. A real poor-me of a post.)

I forgot traffic (n.) and traffick (v.) both exist. I’m still not convinced they’re both real, but the dictionaries seem to think so. I’m pretty sure I’ve been leaving the “k” off the verb form for years, a startling realization that leads me to ruminate about all the other words I must be getting wrong without realizing it. It’s like my late-90s disk and disc meltdown all over again. Floppy? Frisbee? C or K? K or C?

I’m so tired of being dyslexic and having auditory processing disorder and working memory issues and attention deficits with ironic hyperfocus and rumination and neat and tidy OCD and complex PTSD and regular PTSD and other flavors of anxiety on top of my primary immunodeficiency and autoimmune diseases and arrhythmias and dysautonomia and possible kidney issues and whatever the hell is going on with iron overloading and concurrent anemia and TSH issues that come and go without explanation and that cancer I had and may still have and the edema and the asthma and whatever else I can’t even remember at this moment.

It’s a lot, folks. It’s getting old. Y’all, I just want to move around the cabin of life freely and with some assurance that I’m doing an OK job at that. Instead, I end up back by the lavatories when I think I’m heading toward the emergency exit. It’s sheer disorientation much of the time: in my mind, in my body, and at the seams where my mind and body meet the world.

I was trying to make a play on the cabin reference above by following it with the lavatories and emergency exit references, but it didn’t work. It’s too jumbled, the image too burdened. I can’t bring myself to delete the attempt, though, because my body-mind really worked hard at it and I’m so exhuasted and here come the big dewy tears and this water isn’t hydrating me at all because I’m still a walking desert and my GI tract is full of angry fists that feel like a mob is trying to punch its way out of me and I’m so awaketired, so hungrynauseated, so tinglenumb, that the cursed trinity (cabin/lavatories/emergency exit) isn’t going anywhere. It’s staying put. It’s evidence of and a testament to my dysfunction.)

All the hunger all the time and all the eating all the time without moving the needle on the scale at all are back. Parasthesias are back. Maybe some neuropathy, too, which I don’t even want to acknowledge, but the weird stabbing pains in my legs and the sudden feeling of having stepped in water when there is no water aren’t going anywhere, it seems.

Some of this is also from having dysautonomia. Some of this is from having immune system dysregulation and all the diseases and conditions that flow from that dysregulation. Not all of this is because of my TSH dysregulation, and I suspect that dysregulation isn’t a thing on its own, anyway, but instead flows from some combination of my other health issues, as well as from my trauma. Traumas, let’s be honest. It’s traumas, plural. It’s also trauma and trauma (v) if trauma can verb.* I think it can. Think: She will trauma her way through life. Think: May she trauma in peace. Maybe we should spell the verb form differently to avoid confusion, like traffic and traffick. But what would trauma look like spelled any other way? Whatever form it takes, it all looks like ruin.

* Why did Facebook turn my n in parentheses into a thumbs down? I’m too tired to fight you on that, Facebook. Have it your way. You always do. We’re all just here for your profit and pleasure, Facebook. Don’t think we don’t know that’s the case.**

**Oh, I know why. I forgot the periods after the “n” and the “v” on second reference. Fine. My bad, Facebook.

Insomnia Diary Entry Three: I think people count sheep when they can’t sleep because sheep sounds like sleep, so we’re indirectly invoking sleep by using sheep as a kind of mantra, one that allows us to sidle up to sleeping without getting sleep anxiety as we think about how we’re not sleeping.

Oh, no. That’s not it at all. Apparently, shepherds in medieval Britain had to keep a headcount of their sheep each night if they used communal grazing land, so they counted their sheep before going to sleep to ensure they were all there.

Still, I think my thing is also correct: I think sheep works because it’s a stand-in, soundwise, for the thing we’re trying to do, which is sleep.

Insomnia Diary Entry Four: I had two thoughts upon waking at 1:29 a.m. First thought: I’ve reached the age where I can no longer tell if physical exertion is building muscle or destroying muscle. Second thought: The price I pay for whatever I’m doing is having to do more of whatever I’m doing.

Insomnia Diary Entry Five: I am not dovetailed to this world. I’m glued and stapled to it.

Insomnia Diary Entry Six: When someone starts a sentence with the words I’m no conspiracy theorist, you can put money on the fact that a conspiracy theory (technically, a conspiracy hypothesis) will complete that utterance.

Insomnia Diary Entry Seven: I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I don’t trust the water here in Toquerville, Utah. On record, our water management people said at a city council meeting that they sometimes forget to check the water pumps. Then, earlier this year, one of the water pumps broke, and our irrigation water was turned off until a new pump could be ordered.

I just don’t know. You know, govnmnt and whatnot. You never can tell. Never can tell. No, sir. No, siree.

I do know that, without proper filtration, there’s one-thousand-one-hundred times the “safe” amount of arsenic in our water, and that figure isn’t hyperbolic. I looked into it. You know, inurnet and whatnot.

What I’m getting at is this: I drank all my water just now, and I needed more water. My husband and I recently bought a fancy office-level water filter thing that makes cold water, hot water, tea, and coffee. We decided to do it because govnmnt and inurnet and all that, and also because my gums were starting to burn after brushing my teeth with, you guessed it, the local water. (I see a pure D bona fide theory emerging here, not just a measly hypothesis!)

We love the new water filter thing. Just adore it. It’s like the watery baby we never had. We coo at it. We pet it. But it makes this rattling sound whenever it’s used as it pumps more water into whatever parts of the machine need water pumped to them. So I couldn’t fill my water bottle with filtered water just now or else I’d wake my husband up and he’d be all why’d you wake me up you’re ruining my sleep and I’d have no choice but to be all because my own sleep is ruined forever and always and we’re married and this is the for worse part of it which you agreed to in front of that pantheist minister in Eureka Springs Arkansas during a freak March snowstorm back in 1999 so deal with it just deal with it and rub my shoulders while you’re here and get me some filtered water too please and thank you and I love you and don’t leave me and hold me and get away from me and I’m sorry so so sorry I’m just so tired and hurt and tired. And I wouldn’t want to do that, so here I am filling myself with liquid arsenic, folks. The things a good wife does. The things a good wife does.

Insomnia Diary Entry Eight: How do I select my titles? That depends. Sometimes, I write a big thing while I have insomnia, then I look at the thing, my eyes fall to some of the words in the thing, and in my bleary state, I think, Gee whiz, those random words seem like they’d make a good title. Usually, they do. Case in point: Henceforth, the collective title of these insomnia diary entries shall be “Cabin Lavatories Emergency Exit.”

Actually, I think I’ll make the whole series into a poem. But first, I must sheep. I mean sleep. One two three four. Or arrhythmically like my heart: one two (pause) three (longer pause) four.

Insomnia Diary Entry Nine: to sheep, perchance to leme.

Insomnia Diary Epilogue: I slept. Finally. I dressed up like Liza Minnelli after we got back from Jon’s doctor’s appointment, the one about his liver, and I took a hot, stupid, mid-morning nap on top of the covers and with my little dog between my legs, her favorite place to sleep. Was it comfortable? No. I had sequins on and big flashy earrings. All the material from my jeans somehow managed to bunch up between my legs. My dog was bristly like the hairbrush my mother made me use for well over a decade, the pink one that was passed down to me after my sister left the home.

Yes, I had to use my grown sister’s hairbrush when she moved out of the house. If that doesn’t prove to you that I’m the product of Depression- and Dust Bowl-era Oklahomans, nothing will.

See, the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl made my mother frugal. I get it. I do. But seriously, who keeps a hairbrush around that long, washing it every month in the sink like it was going to the spa, rescuing it from various dogs’ mouths and returning it to my drawer covered in an ever-lengthening tactile Morse-like Code of tooth marks? (Maybe that would make it Braille-like. Who cares.)

I didn’t even know people could buy hairbrushes until I was seventeen and saw them at the store. Don’t ask how I never saw them before then. I have attention differences, and my mother probably steered me away from the expensive beauty aisles, especially after my father died and we were trying to make it on her income from the state mental hospital, where she worked as a psychiatric nurse for thirty-five years.

Anyway, at the store back in those days, I was always busy taking the empty glass Coke bottles in to get our deposit back or to buy some cigarettes — if you can even call menthol Virginia Slims that — for my mother. I never saw any hairbrushes until the day I did as a teenager and my mind was blown. I bought one on the spot. A Goodie.

I confronted my mother about the decades-long hairbrush ruse when I got home. She just shrugged or something, then probably took a sip of her vodka, then took a drag of her cigarette, and clicked the clicker to watch the news, something she loved to do because she was passionate about politics. She was a feverish democrat who was in the closet about her political opinions until my father died, then she let it all loose. She’d call all her nurse friends when anything remotely of political interest happened, like the time Reagan came to town and two kids sneaked a big protest sign into the rally.

I know the kids who did that. I wasn’t one of them, sadly. I still had a perm and claw bangs and listened to Duran Duran. I had no desire to tape parts of a sign to my body so I could smuggle them into a room full of adults, then assemble the sign once I was inside. I didn’t want to get arrested. I didn’t want to be dragged anywhere. I had Guess jeans. I had a Coach purse. I was going places in my jelly shoes.

The point is. I took a shit nap, but it was still a nap, and I’m grateful for it.

I’m still pretty violently ill. I have a five-hour training tomorrow as a substitute teacher with ESS, who recently hired me. ESS handles subs for numerous states, including Utah, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. I might be able to use ESS to claw my way out of this state. (And of course I love teaching.) I may have to reschedule the training if things continue to go the way they’re going now.

Listen, all I want is the ease my childhood hairbrush knew. I want to lie in soapy, hot water whiling away my time staring at the nicotine-stained plaster ceiling, not a thought in my bristles, not a pain in my handle. Is that too much to ask? For a little time like that?

That brush. On brush-washing day, I remember having to comb all my hair out of it as my mother ordered. I remember being told to dry it off with a towel. I remember having to position it so it could air dry in the sun streaming through the bathroom window before it went back into the drawer.

That brush was my mother’s favorite child. It’s so obvious. Coddle, coddle, love, love. Hugs and kisses, little brush.

I want this acute health situation to be about bad spinach, mild food poisoning, but the evidence — shared by me last night in the second installment in this series—suggests something more is going on, as always. Maybe if I just don’t eat between now and tomorrow’s training, I’ll be OK. This is the same approach I’ve used as a workaround in the recent past that’s contributed to my losing more and more and more weight.

Conversely, eating more and more and more when violently ill won’t result in my absorbing any calories or nutrients, as they’ll just … ahem … shoot through me like Big Bertha, the tunnel-boring machine used in Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel project. Except it won’t be like Big Bertha at all, because she got stuck for two years starting in 2013 and eventually had to be partially excavated for a repair to solve the issue. Trust me, nothing’s getting stuck inside me and nobody is going to cut into me to bring my body the spare parts it needs to operate properly again.

So to eat, or not to eat, that is the question. To train, or not to train. I guess there are actually two questions at this point.