Exhaustion Day

It's just after 5:30 PM, and I'm finally out of bed for the day. I didn't stay up particularly late yesterday; I was home and in bed by 12:30 AM. It's a bit late, but definitely not beyond the Pale, nor past a typical Netflix binge time. I was asleep soon after my head hit the pillow, to waken only when the Home Care Physiotherapist came by at 11:30 AM to do an assessment of the swelling in my feet and lower legs. Her only requirement for the assessment was that I not get out of bed before she arrived, so my legs would have remained level and supported all night.

Her assessment required that I do nothing, a role I fulfilled happily, and that I not move my legs. Given my particular condition, the lack of movement was an easy task. Yet by the time the Physiotherapist was done with me, I was, or rather, I was still, exhausted. Even as she was poking, pinching, lifting, and prodding my feet and legs, I almost drifted off. When she was done with me, she headed into the other room to use the dining table as a paperwork completion zone. 

By the time she came back into my bedroom, I had already fallen back into slumber. It was 1:00 PM. I dozed on and off for the rest of the afternoon, periodically waking sufficiently to go pee into my jug, but at no time waking sufficiently to feel that I could get out of bed. Finally, at around 5:00 PM, I began to seriously think about the bathroom, and thus compelled my body to do its duty.

I have days like this on an irregular basis, days where the exhaustion gets to me, days where I feel like I can sleep forever. These kinds of days have no pattern; sometimes it happens at times when I get enough sleep and sometimes when I don't, sometimes it happens after a period of busy days and sometimes it happens when I have done little or nothing. They just seem to happen.

But I am up now, having coffee, eating a piece of carrot cake. I'll be up until later this evening, when I will head back to bed, this time more than likely unable to get to sleep at all. That's the irony of this disease. When you want to, you can't. When you don't want to, you can.