8 Hours.

I have found the answer to my lack of sleep. It is called Tamazepam.

Last night, I went to sleep at 10pm and I awoke this morning at 7.30am. I had no dreams. I did not move in the night. It was the nearest I have ever been to being dead.

And it was wonderful.

Wouldn't it be great, if like those astronauts in movies flying hundreds of light years to a planet, they could just make me sleep for the next year or so...and bring me around when all this over? No pain, no yuckiness and no worry. Put me to sleep and wake me up when I am there, on Planet Normal?

Doc Lucy says it is ok to tkae it for a few nights and then, hopefully, I will feel a whole lot better. The lack of sleep was beginning to make me feel ill to be honest...forget the chemo, I am sure it was the lack of sleep.

She also prescribed a different pain killer for the bones...the one I was advised to take was responsonsible for stripping my stomach etc etc. Saying that, the bones seem ok now anyway. And my mouth no longer feels like I have been eating stinging nettles.

So, all in all, feeling a little better today.

Thinking about it, I was unprepared for it all. Taking the Taxotere early knocked me a little...but I think something I learned this week is you can know what the side effects are, you can know they might happen but you truly have no understanding until you suffer them. You can't really be prepared, not the first time I think...perhaps 2 cycles of ineffective FEC put me in a state of denial or, worse, a state of 'I can do this'? I am not beating myself up here, but I will be better prepared next time.

I feel like I have got through this week by the seat of my knickers. Really. I have lurched from one thing to another, handled it as it has hit me hard and generally muddled through. I don't like living like that...next time I will have the pain killers ready as soon as it starts; I will take the sleeping tablets if I need them (and am allowed them? Perhaps they are contra-indicated with Dex?) and I won't got throught this again in the same way.

Ta muchly all for reading. Normal service, I hope, will resume tomorrow. No more feeling sorry for myself...

"Sleep is pain's easiest salve, and doth fulfill all the offices of death, except to kill" - John Donne