“Bedside Manner”
{Furniture & Items Installation}
Beds are important places in this whole business of life and death. We bed in many beds over a lifetime. Most of us were born onto a bed. Indeed, most of us were probably created on a bed. As a child we don’t want to go to bed, a place of darkness and monsters. As we age, our bed becomes our glorious haven of blissful sleep and we don’t want be pulled from it into a meaningless day of chores and 9-5. When we are sick it becomes our ‘sick bed’. For many it is also our healing place of rest, sleep in itself being the great healer and repairer. And yet we are pressured not to ‘stay in bed’ too long or to ‘sleepwalk’ through life. For many, but not all, it becomes our ‘death bed’ where everything ends, where we focus our regrets. Could it be said that those that can die in a bed have the best chance at a better death?
In 2021, my bed became a sick bed and I thought I was dying many a night. My bed witnessed that strange dimension between sickness and death. I would wake in my sleep with head pains and tingles, dizziness and nausea, gasping for air, running to the bathroom with diarrhea, waking and not being able to feel my arms. I would get through each day and be fearful of going to that dreaded place again of bedtime symptoms. Some nights the insomnia was off the charts and sleep would not come anyway, at all. Like many, I turned to my faith to get me through the days and nights, looking also through get well books and getting to know my body. The doctors or hospital couldn’t figure it out. I tried many supplements and alternative medicines which were actually making me worse. I accrued many thousand dollars of medical bills, and did test after test, with no conclusions. The stress of those alone didn’t really help and hung before me all the time. Sometimes I considered the irony of all this medical debt, attempting to stop me from dying and yet might it take the rest of my life to pay it off, so was that a life at all?
It took 9 months to find out from a heating contractor we had a cracked furnace leaking gas and carbon monoxide into the house. None of my initial doctors or hospital staff spotted that’s why I was sick. It took another 15 months to find out I also had had nerve damage from B6 toxicity and a cervical instability in my neck blocking my lymph from clearing from my brain at night. I learned that my ‘symptoms’ were actually my body doing its job. It knew how to heal me and keep me ‘alive’.
I am forever grateful to the doctors and individuals who actually figured it out and helped me get better. Dr. Duncan in West Olympia discovered my B6 Toxicity, Dr. Perrin (Osteopath and Neuroscientist) in the UK helped me understand how my lymph system wasn’t working properly and taught me massage techniques to help, and Olympia Chiropractor, Dr. Cheple (Overland Clinic) started to fix my cervical instability and scoliosis. Beth who set up a Facebook community for those experiencing B6 Toxicity taught me how to heal my nerve damage and at least prevented me running to the ER every time I had a pain.
On those nights that I thought I was dying back in 2021, I would sometimes catch an hour here or there of sleep and I would wake in the morning and open my eyes and see the morning light coming in through the window and feel a sense of relief and gratitude that I had made it through another night. I was still in my sick bed, but I had been given another day to live.
Every morning now, I still have that same experience. I wake. I see the light.
I think and feel ‘Ah’ and sigh with relief.
I get to live another day.