Oliver: Dear deep sleep, where, o where, have you gone?

Blessed sleep, where have you gone?

I realize that I am far from alone in having trouble sleeping these days. I’ve lost count of the number of my friends who deal with insomnia in one form or another. Others, like me, get to sleep but wake up countless times during the night.

I never used to be like this. In fact, I have to admit I was one of those obnoxious people who couldn’t resist chiming in every time the subject of bad sleep came up. I’d mention that I rarely had any trouble falling asleep, and often wouldn’t wake up until the alarm went off. Why, I used to pride myself in never having seen 4 a.m. because I always slept right through it. Obnoxious, right?

Maybe this is a bit of cosmic payback. I’ve definitely earned it.

Sure, there were the occasional nights in the past when I would have a harder than usual time falling asleep. That just meant that it might take me 45 minutes to fall asleep. That, along with some crankiness, usually happened once a month, if you get my drift.

Still, this was not my modus operandi. No, that was seven to eight hours of uninterrupted, deep, dream-filled sleep. If I woke myself up with a nightmare, I’d just roll over and go right back to sleep.

Admittedly, this became its own sort of problem when my mother, who had vascular dementia, came to live with me. My mother would often be up in the middle of the night to walk around, move and talk to things in her bedroom or walk to the bathroom. Rarely did she make it through an entire night without one or more of these things happening.

I had to train myself to be a light sleeper. It’s amazing how fast you can do that after your 85-year-old mother crashes onto the bathroom floor because she misjudged where the toilet was at 4 a.m.

As hard as that was, I still had the ability to take a nap in the middle of the day to make up for whatever Z’s I missed the night before.

After my mother died, I thought I’d go right back to my blissful nights of slumber. My body had other ideas.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019, I had to start taking medicine to suppress my estrogen levels. In essence, I was medically pushed into menopause.

One side effect of that, as many women of a certain age will tell you, is often lousy sleep.

These days, I might fall asleep right away, but I’ll wake up at 2 a.m., then 4 a.m., then 6 a.m. When this happens, I’ll realize how stiff my muscles have become and I’ll try to roll over. This, too, hurts like heck, and in the process, I’ll set off a hot flash. Try sleeping through that, I dare you.

If it’s not that, then my 19-year-old beloved cat, Harriet, will be yowling just outside our bedroom. She no longer hears very well, so it doesn’t pay to yell at her to be quiet. Besides, that might wake up my husband, Tony. Then again, maybe not.

Tony these days sleeps like a baby. A baby with a C-PAP machine that often has air leaks that would make Darth Vader proud. Or he’ll find a way to actually snore despite the mask. It’s a bit of a mystery, but it’s far too much noise for my already sleep-deprived brain to handle at … 4 a.m.

I find myself fiddling with his mask to try to fix the air leak. Or I’ll lift his pillow to try to get his head to move to a different spot. Does he even flinch? Nope.

Despite all of that, and the occasional need to pick up my pillow and crawl to another room for a few minutes of shut-eye, I do seem to be getting at least “enough” sleep. I say that because I do not feel an overwhelming need to take a nap every day.

That’s probably a good thing, too. Tony doesn’t seem to understand what I’m doing when I try to lie down in the middle of the day. He’ll hover to make sure I’m OK.

Have you ever tried to sleep with someone watching? If you’re like Tony, then it really wouldn’t matter. If you’re like me, then you understand. Please, just let me sleep.

• Joan Oliver is the former Northwest Herald assistant news editor. She has been associated with the Northwest Herald since 1990. She can be reached at jolivercolumn@gmail.com.