Hardly a Princess, Barely a Pea

A weirdly dark night of one MS soul

Happy President’s Day my friends!

Have you taken a moment to picture your favorite commander in chief and then silently thank him for giving you a long weekend?

I hope it was a great long weekend!

And I hope that you also enjoyed that earlier February holiday.

No, no, no- not Valentine’s Day.

The OTHER February Holiday-1/2 off chocolate hearts day on 2/15!

Now, for my latest blog-

Technically, I know that the phrase “dark night of the soul” refers to a question of faith, when one is at a low point, filled with confusion, dread, weakness, and sorrow. It is bigger than multiple sclerosis.

Maybe. 

It doesn’t really feel bigger than MS on a bad MS night filled with, well, confusion, dread, weakness, and sorrow.

On a recent night when it’s possible I may have forgotten to take my “so I don’t have to pee all night” medication, I couldn’t sleep. And, you guessed it, I had to pee all night. 

I was ridiculously tired but every time I even started to drift off, there it was, the need to pee again. This was made worse by the fact that though it was nearly midnight, there was a bit of activity outside my front door. Since I couldn’t sleep anyway, I had to go out and investigate. 

There I found a truck idling near a fire hydrant that was spewing a ton of water into the parking lot. So, likely a water main break. Which could explain the other thing keeping me awake, the fact that the water faucet in my sink was flowing this hideous brown water when I turned it on. The toilet was filled with brown water too. 

Being a germaphobe, this grossed me out. Also being a germaphobe, I insist on washing my hands every time I use the bathroom, so things were definitely not going well when it came to the cycle of sleep I craved. I didn’t really know much about plumbing- my own or my water supply’s- but these two issues, the constant need to pee and disgusting brown water visible when I did, were enough to do me in a bit.

(Since, as most germaphobe’s do, I have a ton of hand sanitizer around, I could have just used that to wash my hands and called it a night. Or, at least tried to. But the thing about midnight when you can’t sleep is that you are not usually thinking your best thinks, and it took me 90 minutes to come up with that solution.)

But it wasn’t just these two minor issues- constant need to pee, broken water pipe- that were getting to me. Somehow, when I tossed and turned, I found a grain of sand between my mattress cover and my bottom fitted sheet. 

So what?

Why is that a big deal?

It isn’t.

Or it shouldn’t be.

But because I couldn’t sleep, I now became focused on it.

It was right in the middle of my bed and my hands refused to ignore it. Whatever side of the bed I slept on, however I turned, whatever sleeping position I sought to bring on some slumber, there it was. I had changed the bed sheets that day and that is likely when the grain of sand showed up.

How?

Why?

Where did it come from?

Who knows?

One grain of sand should not keep me from sleeping. I grew up on Cape Cod where there are millions, maybe billions or trillion grains of sand.

(How come I don’t know a better estimation of that and why isn’t that question a Cape Cod math problem? If Bobby spends the day at the beach, and he brings one pail and two shovels, how many grains of sand does he find?)

The point is, I have slept on the beach and thus slept on many, many sands. From the time I was a two-year-old having a meltdown after spending the day with my family on an outing, to the exhaustion that comes from barreling out of the water quickly when you are nine and your older sisters start humming the Jaws theme, to the hundreds of times I went gossiping and tanning with my friends, to the far too many beach parties where perhaps I had one too many wine coolers and just needed a little rest to keep the partying up, I do not have a problem sleeping on sand. 

And one grain of sand is not uncomfortable or even obnoxious. Unless you can’t sleep, it happens to be in the middle of your bed, and you can’t stop obsessing about it.

This was my pattern that night- get up to pee, get skeeved out about the brown water, crawl back into bed and tell myself to stop obsessing about something so silly as a little grain of sand, obsess about it anyway, and then obsess about obsessing about it.

At 2 AM I couldn’t take it anymore and got out of bed, knelt on the floor, lifted the fitted sheet, stuck my arm under it, leaned in as far as I could and tried to reach the offending sand. I couldn’t. I got back into bed and thought about the old fairytale, The Princess and the Pea. What I thought was, that it was stupid.

Your body, no matter how big or how small, would just crush a pea. Even if it wasn’t cooked. If Hans Christian Anderson really wanted to make a point, instead of a pea he should have used sand. That is really what makes it hard to sleep, even for someone like me who has slept on billions of grains of sand. Or more- that old math problem again.

Not feeling like a Princess at all, I added to my stress by trying to talk myself out of unmaking and then remaking my bed. Doing that would just be going way too far, even for me. Instead, I grabbed the remote and gave in to another obsession. 

I turned on Dateline.

I know it is weird to fall asleep watching a true crime show and Dateline should give me nightmares rather than blissful sleep. I don’t know why but sometimes it helps. I’m going to say it is the voices of the narrators.

Don’t believe me? I dare you to turn on a Keith Morrison report late at night and stay awake. There’s a reason why new episodes air on Friday nights.

In the morning, likely the most bleary-eyed princess ever, I was still obsessed with the sand. I got up and before I did anything else, I unmade my bed, found the intrusive sand, tossed it, remade my bed, and finally began to recover.

I have no idea what this particularly bad MS night says about me.

I am weird?

MS sucks?

If I am so sensitive that even a grain of sand can irritate me, maybe I am a princess after all?

If that is true, I am the worst princess ever!

What I ultimately decided was that I am not a princess, but I am weird, multiple sclerosis does suck and maybe, just maybe, the princess in the Princess and the Pea story actually had MS, just like me.