an adventurous spine-bending evening

If you've been following my Twitter feed, you know that I've been suffering from the plague. The tentacles of death seem to become boldest at night as they've been reaching through my dreams, yanking me out of the underworld and thrusting me into an amniotic sac of wakeful sickness into which I cannot breathe. I'd juuuust drift off into a sweet slumber (a blissful reprieve from this ailing consciousness) and suddenly bolt upright choking and gasping for air. This has been happening all week. And so I am missing about 5 good nights of sleep.

Sleep-deprivation, incidentally, is an exceptionally cruel torture method. This cold seemed to be getting worse, not better, and so last night, weary as I was, could not rest. I'd get 5 minutes into a dream before being rudely ripped awake in above said fashion. This happened repeatedly for hours.

After a particularly violent bout of choking where I almost threw up, I started to cry. Uncle! However, I could not even afford myself the luxury of self-pity as tears bring with them their own poison and I couldn't allow an increase in snot production. I swallowed the bitter feelings of the repose-impoverished and decided to try a new game plan. Even overdosing on medicine didn't seem to help so something else was in order.

I'd BEEN sleeping on a stack of pillows up high. I'm a back sleeper, so this felt not unlike lounging on the couch. But it still didn't help. I decided to try sleeping on my side. Note that with the current setup, this approach required a kind of bending of the spine which probably should not occur at all, let alone for 8+ hours straight:


However, I am pleased to report that it seemed to help. I slept!! And the muscle aches don't feel much different so either I'm already so broken it doesn't matter what contorted position I shape myself into at night, or the spine, when heated to a temperature above the bodily norm of 98.6, is able to bend much more gracefully than expected. Experiment to be repeated tonight.