I went into the bedroom to lie down and read a magazine at about 7:30 pm, and woke up at 12:30 am. If I had been aware I was tired, I wouldn't have lain down. Usually I'm aware when I'm falling asleep, but this time it was like someone threw the off switch.
I had an interesting dream. There was a rolling grass sward dotted with trees, very pretty, with scattered one-story buildings. I was to choose one of the buildings to live in. I'd get one large (house-sized) room. The room I chose was huge and L-shaped. (For ease, lets call the parts of the room the leg, the ankle, heel, and toe.) The door was in the top of the leg, and then the whole width of the bottom of the heel and toe was floor to ceiling glass, looking out on one of the most beautiful views of sweeping grass, trees, a small pond in the distance, and no other buildings.
I wanted to put the bed in the top of the leg, the dining area in the ankle, and the living area in the heel and toe, in front of the glass. To shield the bed, I wanted to hang curtains from the ceiling across about the top of the ankle, and then leave the window wall uncurtained. There was someone with me - unidentified, but I think they were somehow associated with the facility - who insisted that that wouldn't do at all, because the entrance would be right next to the bed. He said I had to put the bed in the toe, where it wouldn't be visible from the door, and the living area in the leg. To shield the bed, I'd have to put curtains all the way across the windows. Yeah, that would look nicer as you enter the room, but that's not what I wanted. I wanted to make the living area part of the outside. I was very conflicted. Then I woke up.
I'm sure there's some meaning there, but I haven't figured it out yet.
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Miss Thunderfoot seems to be feeling a bit better. She is now up and around, and has eaten some canned cat food. I'm a little concerned because she has been rejecting water. She asks for skim milk, but when I pour some for her she acts like that's not what she was expecting.
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Although the TV is on almost all the time, I'm rarely watching it. It's just there to mark time passing. But last night House came on, and I watched it intently (first time I'd ever seen it) because the case seemed so much like Jay's early problems.
The patient was a teenager with severe night terrors, and occasional acute delusional states, and some other stuff....
Before Jay and I were married, I had noticed he had sleep apnea, and I packed him off to a sleep study lab. They determined that he had an average of more than 80 episodes per hour, and next to no REM. They didn't see how he could possibly be sane. He got a CPAP (constant positive airway pressure) machine, and for the first time since childhood he was able to sleep.
Then, after we were married in 1994, I found that he had night terrors. Every so often, he would wake me in the middle of the night by wrapping his arms around me, and holding me tight while rocking back and forth and shouting. In his mind, we were in a boat that was shooting down steep, fast, violent rapids, and he was holding me to keep me from falling out of the boat. Or he'd leap out of the bed shouting and fighting off something attacking him. Hooked up to the CPAP machine, he'd sometimes pull it right off the nightstand.
He also had acute delusional episodes. It was sort of like sleepwalking, since it would happen during the night, but he was more aware than with sleepwalking. I'd find him in the kitchen or living room looking around confused. He didn't recognize the house, didn't know where he was. He'd know who he was, and who I was, but the house was strange to him. When he described what it should look like, it sounded like his fraternity house from college, or his childhood home. Or else he did know where he was, and he'd be packing a suitcase for the trip we were taking the next day (there's no trip!).
He could carry on a perfectly reasonable conversation, except for the delusion. I'd just persuade him to come back to bed for a bit, and he'd fall asleep, and the next day he'd wonder why the suitcase was out and half packed, or why all the books were off the shelf and on the floor, or whatever else he had done during the night.
If it had happened more often than it did, and if he hadn't said people told him he sleepwalked when he was in college, and if I hadn't had night terrors myself in my late teens and 20s, and if his terrors and delusions hadn't tapered off and finally stopped in the second year of our marriage, I would probably have dragged him to a doctor, although I doubt that we could have found anyone that could figure it out.
So anyway, this kid on House was having a severe condensed case of Jay. So I was interested in what tests they ran and what they determined was causing it.
The kid was adopted, and the natural mother had apparently never been vaccinated for measles, and ... at this point I must have missed something because it doesn't make sense to me ... but anyway something about measles virus ... hidden ... lurking ... result encephalitis.
Hmmmm.
Probably not Jay's problem. And given the rate at which his brain tumor grew, it's highly unlikely that the tumor existed before late 1998. But it is possible that there was some kind of lesion, that changed character between 1995 and 1998. I confess that when the long-standing night terrors and confusion went away after we'd been married a little while, I thought it was because I was so good for him (pride goeth before a fall). Since then I've wondered if my pushing him into the sleep study and getting the CPAP machine may have caused the tumor, like that the brain getting more oxygen caused the cells at the (assumed) lesion site to become more active, to attempt to repair, resulting in cancerous mutation.
We'll never know, and that's frustrating.
~~Silk
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