Well, That Bites…

Time for another brief personal update. The post’s tile is partially a pun. I’ve been sidetracked and away from the blog not only due to holiday stuff, but because I also literally got bit by.. something.

My suspicion after doing some internet research is that it’s a spider bite, likely a black widow or brown recluse. I never felt the bite nor saw any spider though. The first day I noticed it, I wasn’t sure what it was and it didn’t look TOO bad all things considered. I decided to wait a day and see how it progressed.

Image via http://billericky.hubpages.com/hub/poisonous-venomous-spiders-brown-recluse-black-widow-most-poisonous-spiders-images

This is a pic from the internet. For new followers, I’m paranoid about personal photos online, hence this pic as a stand-in. My apparent bite is on my calf and looked similar but the center is darker and hard like a scab.

Getting back to the story, by the end of the day, my calf was showing some swelling, and I wasn’t feeling so good. Long story short, we spent almost 3 hours waiting in the local ER, got literally one minute of face time with an actual doctor (who barely looked at the alleged bite), and sent with some antiseptic wash and a prescription for major antibiotics.

Aside from the lousy ER experience though (and they were not that busy BTW), the whole event has been pretty mild for what was likely a bite by a dangerous spider. I felt lousy for a few days, and slept ALOT, but the wound is slowly healing as opposed to the horrific click bait pics out there of widow or recluse bites just rotting away huge areas of flesh.

At this point, the worst of it all is that the Doxycycline antibiotics make me sick to my stomach, even if taken with food. That’s minor in the grand scheme of things however. 🙂

The big trick is going to be catching up on all the Christmas stuff I still have to do. We’re hosting not one, but TWO dinners this year. Christmas day will be five people, and then Sunday will have 11 of us after the out of state in-laws finally make it to town.

I could have just left everything at Sunday only but Christmas is supposed to be celebrated on Christmas, dangit. 😀 😀

Sleep, Lack of It, and Sleep Deficit

Something I’ve heard many times over the last decade is the idea that proper amounts of sleep is important not only because of the long term slow toll it takes on you, but also that a “sleep deficit” can’t be made up. For example; running on 4 hours of sleep a night during the work week and then trying to (partially) make up for it on the weekend.

Personally, I think this is yet another example of twisting scientific fact to try to scare people into good behavior. Lack of sleep always catches up with us eventually. It doesn’t matter how superhuman we try to kid ourselves into believing we are, nor how much we might abuse stimulants like caffeine or the toxic waste called energy drinks.

Yes, energy drinks are VERY bad for you. I’ve seen first hand what abusing them can do to a person. That’s a separate post however.

Staying on topic however, I can tell you that my body demands a sleep deficit be made partially up. My most recent experience here is after my acupuncture treatment roughly 36 hours ago.

Prior to that, my mid back was acting up so badly that I hadn’t gotten more than 3 hours of quality sleep in a night for over a month straight. Beyond that, it was laying there awake, or waking up every few minutes, etc… I was such a mess that my blood pressure readings at the clinic indicated I am now at the lower levels of stage two hyper-tension. O_O

The treatment released enough pain and tension that I finally have been able to sleep though, and I’ve spent probably 24 of the last 36 hours sleeping. Not the first time I’ve had similar experiences either (although I think this is the most extreme example). So some degree of sleep deficit does indeed need to be made up.

It makes a huge difference when you do also. Brain fog is lifting for me, my creativity is feeling close to normal again, I have more energy… I feel like that hyper-tension has gone down also. Meditation and yoga will hopefully fix the rest of it. I can tell I’m not out of the sleep deficit woods yet either, but I’m getting there.

Lesson for the day here; ideally to get proper sleep in the first place. You have to “Sharpen the Saw” (as Stephen Covey put it) if you’re going to function at peak efficiency. Barring that, make a real effort to catch up on missed sleep. If you don’t, it WILL catch up with you sooner or later, in one form or another.