Sleepless nights, endless thoughts

Last night I could not sleep.

It was not due to temperature, the fact i'd had a nap in the day or my recent addiction to the new Netflix horror show.

I was laying in bed, tossing and turning, with a non stop whirring in my mind. Like an old cassette that was being rewound over and over and replayed. My thoughts lay with general worries about my age and growing up. About how I am starting to make big and life changing decisions, a few steps behind a lot of my friends who have already achieved many of their life goals.

I have never been one for decision making. Infact I am, what my parents have often called, a ditherer. I am "Miss Procrastination". The decisions I am making at the moment are not so scary, they are more exciting...It's just always knowing ultimately that you have done the right thing. After about an hour of countless turns in the bed and thinking of the future, my mind hit the end of the cassette recording and went into rewind.

It took me back to a time I have thought about a lot, a time that I have not made peace with just yet, and this is what I played, step by step, word for word, as I lay in bed, from this point here I need to state a TRIGGER WARNING.

In mid 2014 I was in hospital for an Operation. Sparing all the details, it was a relatively big op but as advised by the doctors it would be straight forward. It was not.

I arrived at the hospital with my mum at 7.30. I was told I would be first in. I was not, I was taken down to surgery at around 1pm after not being able to eat or drink at any time during the money. By this point, I was "hangry".

I was taken into the room full of men, intimidating enough for a 28 year old wearing a flimsy hospital gown, to be given general anaesthetic. For those of you who have never had a general anaesthetic, it feels like going from sober to "don't-know-what-you're-doing-drunk" in the space of 10 seconds.

I woke up surrounded by nurses in a very busy room. I wanted to sleep, they wanted me to wake up...it was like being hassled by your parents on a school day to "Get the heck out of bed for the millionth time!!!".

I was rolled back to the ward, humiliatingly through all the corridors filled with regular people staring at you and wondering what has happened. I had remembered doing the same as a kid, because I didn't understand humiliation back then. I didn't realise how much people hated hospitals and how much being paraded through it's internal streets, immobilized and uncomfortable, would match up to some peoples worst nightmares.

When back on the ward I was fine. Incredibly sore, in a lot of pain but ultimately I was fine. The worst was over, physically. The worst, mentally, was yet to come. I was woken throughout the night, blood pressure was taken, water was sipped and 101 toilet trips were taken (the walk alone was painstakingly slow and painful, that didn't change for a good few weeks!). In the morning I was awoken for breakfast. I stayed awake long enough to eat and asked when I would be seeing the doctor (who had been due to give me an overview of my op when I came out of theatre, but hadn't). I fell asleep waiting. I woke up to be asked by an unknown nurse if I could get dressed and wait for my parents in the waiting room so I could free up the bed, the curtain swiftly being drawn around me and I was segregated from the rest of the ward. I was confused, I could barely move, I hadn't seen a doctor and yet I was being asked to leave. I rolled off the bed and at this point I noticed a piece of paper next to me which had not been there at breakfast, and there in black and white I read the outcome to my operation. I read it all. You see when I had signed the paperwork a few months earlier I had been told there was a worst case scenario, nothing life threatening or anything!, but that in my case it was so unlikely they were not worried at all. This is why I had been anxious to see the doctor. The paperwork told me the worst case scenario had happened and in that moment I was inconsolable. I was in the hands of people I trusted, I was being kicked out of the bed while in agony, the doctors hadn;t bothered to talk to me about a concern I had but left it there for me to read at the moment I felt truly alone, shielded from the rest of the ward. I broke that barrier, because without meaning to, I wailed. I cried so loudly while pressing my alarm they came running, and I yelled about the doctors, I yelled at the poor nurse and for the first time in a long time, all I wanted right there and then was my mum. I wanted to not feel as alone as I did in that second.

The nurse who had asked me to move me apologised, as she was under the impression the doctors had spoken to me. The doctors, 3 of them, came and talked me through my op, which is all I had wanted in the first place. An elderly lady in a nearby bed offered to sit in the waiting room herself, to free up her bed so I could stay in mine. My mum and dad came to me, quick as a flash. They scooped me up and took me home. They took me away from the source of my physical pain which had been overshadowed by my betrayal of the doctors, my mental pain was now eclipsing the physical.

There it has stayed, untouched, unhealed. The events of those 24 hours had such an impact on my life that the majority of my life experiences are compared to it.

There is now Pre-August 2014 and Post-

August 2014.

These events played in my mind while I lay in bed, exactly as they had happened. They played so clearly that tears even rolled onto the pillow.

I don't know what bought this up last night, but I guessed the life decisions had something to do with it, because no matter what now, that will always come with me. I just don't want it to be hanging over me, I would rather lay it on the ground and picnic on it!

It's all part of learning, its all knowing how you should be treated whatever circumstance you find yourself in. You will make right decisions in what you say and do, and if you don;t you will learn for next time.

It's also knowing that when you have sad and dark thoughts that come back to haunt you at night, they will be gone again by morning.

The dark does not stay forever.

*Kim*