Three Beautiful Things 05-21-2024: Up All Night, Irregular Sleep, Cooked Up a Storm

1. I'm doing my best to surrender to the fact that it'll be a while, I hope, before I have long stretches of sleep at night. For many, many years now, I've had to get up and go to the bathroom frequently all through the night. Years ago, I decided to make this potential source of frustration a source of gratitude. Many people suffering from kidney disease and failure cannot produce urine. 

I always have. 

So, even of it were four in the morning and I was making my third or fourth trip to the bathroom, I uttered thanks that my diseased native kidneys were functioning. Now, not only am I up once or twice an hour through the night, I am also relieving myself in a plastic bottle and keeping a record of how many cubic centimeters I create every twenty-four hours. 

My gratitude for this (I do hope) temporary inconvenience is even more profound now. 

My new kidney is working. 

2. Yes. I'm up and down all night. The last few mornings, at around 4:30, I've decided not to go back to bed, but have stayed up and begun my morning routines, recording vitals, drinking coffee, working puzzles, and continuing to visit the bathroom. 

My Fitbit tells me I'm sleeping about four hours through the night, so as the day progresses, I'm adding to that total with naps, knowing that I need restorative sleep as I recover. I'm grateful that I am at liberty to have these unusual sleep patterns right now, that they are not a bother to anyone and that there's nothing to keep me from focusing on taking good care of myself. 

3. You'd think that since my sleep is out of whack and I'm a bit sleep deprived that I'd be crapped out. 

Not the case. 

Tonight, I fixed Debbie and me a meatloaf dinner with garlic mashed potatoes, roasted Brussels sprouts, and a thyme sauce for the meat. 

Yes, it was a HelloFresh meal, but it required quite a bit of attention to detail with several parts of the meal all underway at the same time. 

And, sure, I got a tuckered out a bit, but not only was it a delicious supper that came at the end of what had been a long day at school for Debbie, but I recovered quickly from whatever minor fatigue I felt, really happy that on Day 10 of this transplant progress, I was able to not only cook up a storm, but enjoy doing it and eating it.