It's hard for me to believe it now, but when I was a kid I had to be FORCED to do two things: eat my dinner and go to sleep. As an adult I'm the exact opposite. Once I do either of those things I basically have to be FORCED to stop.

The worst thing about my current health issues is that I've had a terrible time sleeping for the past week. Between last Monday morning and yesterday evening, I hadn't had more than an hour of sleep at one time. My bladder keeps me in the bathroom day and night, usually three or four times in an hour. There have been a few spells when I've had to go to the bathroom literally every five minutes for two or three hours at a time.


And the pain I'm experiencing keeps me from sleeping, too.

However, last evening I fell asleep and actually stayed asleep from about 7:30 until 10:30. Three hours! Three blessed hours of uninterrupted sleep! I know it doesn't sound like a big deal, but it was a God-send to me last night. When I first woke up again around 10:30 PM, I felt ready to take on the world. That feeling faded pretty quickly, but those three hours of sleep really did me a world of good.

I've been awake since then, though ... like every other night this week. I used to be a night-owl when I was younger, and there was a time when I'd have used this awake-time productively. Instead, this week I've used my surplus waking hours doing things like watching TV, listening to music, and watching YouTube videos and turning them into blog posts.

I've also read about bladder cancer and joined a discussion board for people with bladder cancer ... and I've read a little bit about sleep, sleep deprivation, and dreams.

I took a quiz that's designed to assess how healthy my sleep habits are, and I answered all the questions truthfully, based on my current condition. I didn't provide answers based on my usual sleep habits. According to the quiz, I currently likely suffer from sleep apnea, insomnia, narcolepsy and restless leg syndrome. Whoo hooo! I hit a grand slam!

There are a lot of sites on the net full of interesting info about sleep, such as this one and this one and this one and this one and this one.

Here are some of the interesting trivia tidbits I've learned about sleep, sprinkled liberally with nuggets of BS I made up. Can you tell which of these items are actual facts and which ones are SouthCon hogwash? I'll tell you what's real and what's not in the first comment.

• People who've been blind since birth or very early childhood do not experience sight in their dreams. But blind people who lost their sight at the age of seven or later will still be able to see in their dreams even as much as sixty years after the loss of their sight.



• Sometimes, blind people report dreams in which they've "seen" people or things that they've never seen in real life.



• We all have an internal sleep/wake "clock," though some are more reliable than others. In 1998 there was a study in which scientists shined a light onto the backs of people's knees and this caused them to "reset" their internal "clocks." The scientists still have no idea why they observed this phenomenon.



• Investigations determined that sleep deprivation played a role in the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident.



• The extra-hour of sleep received when clocks are put back at the start of daylight savings time in Canada has been found to coincide with a fall in the number of road accidents.



• The study that lead to the discovery of REM sleep was done in 1953. It had not been done previously because scientists were literally concerned that the study would be a waste of paper.



• Winston Churchill said "You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That's what I always do. Don't think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That's a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations."



• The record for the longest period without sleep is 18 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes. Nonetheless, you are still likely to die from sleep deprivation sooner than from starvation. A person can go a few weeks without food but can usually only go about ten days without sleep.



• Sleep deprivation has been shown to be a factor in obesity, high blood pressure, and the onset of diabetes.



• People who routinely don't get enough sleep build up a "sleep debt," which is detrimental to overall health. Sleep debt can't be eliminated by getting extra sleep on the weekend. In short, it is impossible to "catch up" on sleep. The only way to eliminate sleep debt is to adjust your schedule and start getting enough sleep every night.

Labels: Bladder Cancer, Personal, Trivial Matters