Kitchen Ghosts

It’s 1:30am and I’m standing in my kitchen eating a bowl of granola cereal, hoping I don’t throw up and wondering if there are demons in my house trying to possess me. I want to cry, I’m so tired. All I want is sleep. If I lie on my left side, my left arm and leg go numb, my cheek tingles – if I roll to the right, the same thing happens on that side as the pins and needles subside on the other. If I lie perfectly still on my back, my neck hurts slightly, my feet want to cramp. I had dozed off for a little while, but then I saw these flashing lights above my bed… and I was so hungry… I’ll realize later that I was seeing migraine auras. This doesn’t occur to me when I’m standing in my kitchen in the middle of the night worrying about the supernatural. I have the hood light over the stove on, because it just seems unnecessary to turn on the bright pot lights overhead… but right here, in this moment, I’m a little bit scared of the dark. I don’t want to fully admit it to myself, but I'm also scared that if I turn the “big light” on it might just make it easier to see the boogey man that is surely lurking in the shadows of my living and/or dining room, keeping me from sleeping.

I eat as quickly as I can. I’m so hungry. I don’t remember ever being so hungry that it’s woken me up in the middle of the night, so hungry that I almost feel like I need to vomit from the tempest of stomach acid churning inside me, forcing me to sleepily slog downstairs and find something quick and hopefully filling. I finally finish my late-night cereal, shove half a banana in my mouth and chug a large glass of milk.

I half-almost-run back up the stairs. I leave the stove light on. I don’t want the shadows to get me. The upstairs hall is so dark. I’m 5 years old again at my grandma’s – if I can just get down the hallway I can hide in the bed. Deep breaths while reminding myself that I’m adult and this is my house and nothing scary or bad has ever happened here, I make myself walk slowly, walk quietly, to the bedroom. The only ghosts that are chasing me are the ghosts of a familiar irrational feeling...

I’m so scared of the numbness. My mind starts telling me that if I fall asleep I’ll probably just stop breathing altogether because my lungs will go numb or some other weird thing that’s probably not even possible. I’m panicking as my husband snores. He’s slept more soundly in the last two weeks than he feels like he ever has, he tells me at dinner Monday night.

I lie in corpse pose (ironic) under the covers and try to breathe deep into my belly, slow on the inhale, slower on the exhale. I think it may have been close to 3:30am before my mind finally gave up on creating horrendous organ-failure-due-to-numbness scenarios and the yoga breathing allowed me to pass out. The baby woke up at 5:50am.

I slept on the couch from about 6am until close to 8am. I didn’t go numb at all, I didn’t imagine my organs failing once. I just slept… but on the way to work, it started again. My right hand was all tingles, my hip, my foot. I was starving. Again.

I had breakfast (two breakfasts, actually) and popped a bunch of B Complex thinking that all this tingling crap might all be some kind of bizarre migraine side-effect. It seemed to help a bit.

You know what else B vitamins are good for? Keeping stress and anxiety hormones in order.

I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s a pretty clear sign of high stress/anxiety when one is awake in the middle of the night concerned about being possessed by demons due to seeing some migraine auras. …this could also be made worse by the fact that American Horror Story can be scary. Or late-onset paranoid schizophrenia. Let’s just really hope it’s not late-onset paranoid schizophrenia.

Tomorrow I go and meet with a new therapist. Tomorrow can’t come fast enough. I also called and scheduled a physical/check-up with my regular doctor for later this month. Sure as hell couldn’t hurt to have some blood tests run, check hormone levels, etc. I don’t know that I’ve had a regular check-up since I was 17 or 18.

The point of this bizarre story is not to make you realize that I’m even crazier than you already thought I was (though I am sure it probably accomplished just that!), but more to show myself what a breaking point I’m reaching.

I had made a promise to myself within the last couple weeks, that come April I would be making some serious life and lifestyle changes. Some of those changes I can begin working on immediately, some of them I originally felt like needed to wait. I’m not sure how much longer those other things can wait anymore. More and more I wake up in the morning and think to myself, “I can’t live like this.”

You’d think I was in some kind of abusive situation or something… I know I seem a bit dramatic, but it feels very stifling, smothering. I can’t even get into a lot of it here because it would be unprofessional and could get me into trouble. Even in saying that I feel as if I’m not being quite vague enough.

Something’s gotta give, and as much as I want to say, “This is what I need and want and this is how I get it, so I’m doing it right now!”, I know that it’s also a delicate situation and a delicate balance and these decisions are ones that I cannot take lightly or be reckless with. I’m hoping within another couple weeks I’ll be able to have the energy and focus to put a plan into place and start taking responsibility for bettering myself and my life so that I don’t have to spend any more nights cowering in my kitchen over a bowl of granola worrying about the boogey man and organ failure as I listen to my husband’s quiet snores coming from upstairs.