Another Thursday missed

Well, I didn't do an update on Thursday, mostly because I stayed home and did some tidying up. The upshot of which is in the afternoon, when I normally would have spent some time online catching up with stuff, I took a near life-changing three hour nap.

I love naps. I love naps more than sleeping at night. I tend to fall asleep faster, deeper, and wake up actually refreshed after a long daylight-hours nap than I do at night. Part of me wonders if I'm reverting to a pre-antidepressant, grad-school state of actually being afraid to go to sleep at night (for a number of neurotransmitter-related all-in-your-head kinds of reasons) but having no problem sleeping, say, between 7am and noon, and again between 3pm and 6pm. Which explains why all my best writing occured between 1 and 3am. Typical grad school kind of schedule, but not what you call mentally healthy.

I've always been a thrasher in my sleep, and my fancy new space-age mattress that is supposed to eliminate that hasn't. Which is not a problem, except that in the last few weeks instead of going to sleep on my back and waking up on my back, but in the meantime having traversed every possible angle and position--I used to go to sleep on my back, blankets nice straight and wake up that way, but with all my blankets turned upside-down. Anyway, lately I've been waking up with my upper body folded over onto my right, trapping my right arm under my body. Which would be fine--I guess my shoulders are unusually flexible in that direction--but it usually means my right elbow and wrist are flexed as well--so not only am I stressing the blood flow, I'm stressing my ulnar nerve, and setting off my intermittend ulnar palsy.

This is a new word for me, and I'm sort of enamo(u)red of it, in the way that when somebody gives you a new word for something that you thought only you ever experienced or thought about you feel validated. Ulnar Nerve Palsy is a condition where you get tingling/numbness, etc. in your ring and little fingers related to stressing the nerve, which runs along the outside of the elbow. Since I've been experiencing this in both arms, mostly from my habit of clutching my blankets up to my chin when I'm cold--which I almost always am in the morning--I've been trying to keep my elbows mostly extended in bed. Which works fine as long as I'm awake, and on my back, and warm, but whem rolled over on your side or belly it's hard to keep your arms straight. And apparently my body is trying to get me to sleep on my side. Or something.

One wonders if this is my (familial) history of snoring and/or apnea finally catching up with me. I'm really hoping it's just the 20 lbs I've put on in the last six months, and as I retake control of my diet and whatnot, I'll go back to normal. For some value of 'normal'.