Wow, that was hard, all-reserves depleted crash…
As mentioned, last night I could only sleep for maybe an hour at a time because there was still packing in my nose from Monday’s surgery, which made it hard to breathe.
The good news is that I was able to remove it by mid-day, which helped a lot, and I’d gotten a good tip about using saline spray to keep the inside of your nose from drying out and crusting up (which can make it hard to breathe).
But needless to say I was really tired, and decided to only go to the closest restaurant a block away to get something to eat, and not try to push farther.
Good decision. Usually, it’s hard for me to do much more than nap in the afternoons, between the heat, the traffic noise and my being light sensitive. Not today. I crashed out hard for six hours, and woke up exhausted.
I probably could go back to sleep, but I don’t want to end up waking up in the middle of the night and getting my sleep cycles all screwed up, plus I need to start eating some of the food I’ve got around to house to build up a small amount of energy so that I can go down to the market next door, and get some more food for the apartment, and then eat a bit more later on, so I’ve got the energy get some dinner.
A wise friend, who had the same surgery down here, said it’s like you have multiple reservoirs of energy: short-term (minutes), medium-term (hours), long-term (days), longer-term (weeks) and so on. You can only take from the short-term one, but it re-fills gradually from the others. After surgery, it’s like a drought came and dried up the medium- and long-term reservoirs, so now they’re a lot lower. It all feels normal… until the short-term one doesn’t refill. It takes time for the energy to flow from way back in the longer-term reservoirs, and in the meantime you just have to wait. As you heal, gradually you refill out the nearer reservoirs and things gradually return to normal. But the refilling takes time, and it’s easy to think “I’m back!” when you’re not quite, yet.
I definitely know what she means now. So yeah, despite a renewed bout of cabin fever, I’d being patient and resting hard.