A Long Time To Get Here

I'm up, finally. It's been a long haul since last night, most of it spent sleeping. I went to bed at 11:00 PM yesterday and woke up at 1:00 PM today. I was up several times at night, what with having to go pee, having coughing fits, and needing to move my legs. So while it was a long sleep, it was not an uninterrupted sleep.

After I woke up, an event coordinated with another need to go pee, I managed to take my "morning" pills, thereafter immediately rolling back into bed, this time not to sleep so much as to doze and wonder, the next step in my awakening process. I do that a lot, get up in stages. After about a half hour I finally had the energy to grab my phone whereupon I checked the news and spent a while browsing Facebook. All of this took another hour.

It was 2:30 PM before I actually got out of my bed, this time to go to the washroom. After finishing the first bit, I washed up and then brushed my teeth. Ablutions complete, I went back into my bedroom and transferred back onto the bed. It was time to get dressed. The whole bathroom and dressing process, interrupted by a call to my daughter regarding Christmas travel plans, took around 45 minutes to complete. It was 3:15 PM and I was almost ready to get up for the day.

The last step in this whole journey of wakefulness is the transfer from my bed back into my wheelchair, perhaps the easiest thing I do each day. It's been getting more difficult as my ability to lift has been decreasing, but I can still do it without incident. So I did. There I am, up and ready to start my day, and it's only 3:30 PM. Thank goodness I get to stay up late tonight; Tuesday is Trivia.

The whole 14 hours of sleep, an hour of pre-arisal rest, the half hour bathroom visit along with the half hour to get dressed makes for a long night into morning. I spend more than half my day in bed these days. Of course soon, all too soon, that will increase to all of my day. I am not looking forward to that.

I am grateful that I can still get up and about. I can still make my "morning" coffee. I can still spend the rest of this day enjoying life as it presents itself to me. It's just that it takes such a long time to get here.