Rough couple of days
Wednesday evening my back was spasmodic. Car accident a year ago still acts up on some days. Wednesday, it was pretty bad, seizing up on me. I couldn’t find a comfortable position. Couldn’t sleep at all. All night, I tried laying down, sitting, standing. Used a lot of ice packs. This led me to get maybe 45 min. to an hour sleep, total.

Thursday morning, I was officially up by 5 am, out the door by 5:35 for work. I train soft skills for,a health care company. I was training a pilot of a new class in the morning. A 4 hour class on patient and caregiver experiences and how we can better handle them in our Care Mgmt. team. This is a class I wrote and created, including all the slides, handouts, activities, everything, after consulting with the team requesting it. Hours of prep went into this.

The pilot ran great. The managers in attendance gave strong feedback on how important the topics were to cover and how nicely it was presented. I was pretty happy with the results myself. They never knew I was running on no sleep and still in quite a bit of pain. Adrenaline helped me through it.

I had a different training session to lead in the afternoon, with only a quick lunch break to eat and get set up. That was a session for supervisors on how to give constructive feedback/ disciplinary conversations to their direct reports who were being written up for some sort of violation. Tough topic to tackle and there were many questions to answer along the way. It still went great overall, with solid engagement by the participants.

By the time I got home, it was going on 7 pm. Long day and I was drained. A close to 2 hour commute home did not help my back at all. I had a cocktail or two to unwind and was hoping to collapse into much needed sleep.

That didn’t happen. Another restless night. I saw 1am on my clock. I remember seeing 2:15, 3am, 4am, 5am. I finally dozed for about 90 minutes around 5:30 or so. I had a short training session scheduled for lunchtime. The site administrator needed to cancel it and I was relieved. My brain felt foggy and focusing was a struggle. As much as I wanted to sleep, my back wouldn’t let me. I was able to answer some work issues through emails.

Quick trip to the grocery store in the afternoon with my daughter. Down one aisle, I saw a short, petite older women heading away from me. My mom was super short. 5’0” until she shrunk down to 4’11” when she got a bit older. She died almost 25 years ago. This woman in the aisle looked like my mom’s approximate size and shape. I wanted my daughter to see her because she never got to know her grandma. The woman disappeared before my daughter caught up to me. No big deal.

We finished up and headed to the car. I got in the driver’s side while my daughter loaded the bags in the trunk. I suddenly burst into tears. I completely broke down. My daughter asked what was wrong and I just blurted out , “I miss my mom so much.” I think the lack of sleep and pain left me in an extremely vulnerable state and seeing that woman just triggered me.

I couldn’t even drive. My daughter drove us home while I blubbered a bit more. I did doze for a few minutes on the couch, but I still need some solid slumber. Sleep is still elusive for me. I can’t function like this much longer. At least it’s the weekend. I will try to rest, even if I’m not fully unconscious.