A Good Night's Sleep

Sunday, 11 February 2007
1700

Finally, a good night’s sleep!

At home I have a bed with a mattress made of viscoelastic foam (“memory foam”), like the Tempur-Pedic bed that is widely advertised. It gives me the most amazing back support, and a wonderful night’s rest. I have really missed it over here. I don’t sleep as well, and despite regular PT and thorough stretching, my back has slowly deteriorated and begun to bother me more and more. (Aside from my bed, I miss my chiropractor).

I finally decided there must be something I could do about it, and investigated simply buying my own bed here. I settled on a “mattress topper” made of the same kind of viscoelastic foam. I bought the thickest one I could find – a 3” “Therapedic” from Bed, Bath, & Beyond. (I guess Kuwait qualifies as “beyond” ). :-)

I was very surprised at how quickly it arrived – only 3-4 days after I placed the order. I put it on my bed, and covered it with the mattress cover I also bought (never had one of those – they don’t sell them here). What a difference! I sunk into my bed and didn’t want to get up. It has really made a huge difference in my sleep – I sleep through the night now without waking up, whereas for the first four months here I was up every couple of hours stretching, and tossing and turning most of the rest of the time.

I don’t know what I was thinking not to have looked into this before, but I guess I wasn’t feeling the need acutely enough to act. I have looked into a chiropractor here, but they don’t have one. Even though the Army has technically “accepted” chiropractic, you can tell from the attitude of the medical personnel that they don’t really acknowledge them as valid medical professionals. They had less than zero interest in helping me locate one. The only one I ever even heard of was up in Iraq, and I read about him in the Stars and Stripes. But the medical people here wouldn’t even consider letting me go see him. It seems that the medical evacuation system only travels in one direction – they “do not evacuate forward”, even if that’s where the doctor is.

I’ll go see my own chiropractor a couple times while I’m on R&R leave in May, and I guess that will be it.

The good news is how the Matt Furey exercises almost magically erase back pain for me. I can be stiff and sore in the morning, but doing the “Royal Court” of hindu squats, hindu pushups, and a three minute bridge make me a new man. That relief lasts all day, but by the next morning I have usually been all twisted up again. Now that I’ve had this mattress pad a couple of days, that is beginning to change. So I hope I’m not too far gone to self-recover without the help of my chiropractor.

Anyway, three cheers for a good night’s sleep!

There’s not really anything else new to report from here – life stays about the same. I struggle with the same kinds of issues that any manager does – personnel issues, time & resource management issues, an unresponsive bureaucracy, and people with inexplicably different priorities and perspectives than mine. :-)

I recently found about fifteen Louis L’Amour novels in one of the many piles of books that are laying around everywhere (people donate books by the thousands, so there’s lots to read over here). So I have been reading these old friends in the evenings and escaping into the mountains, valleys, and plains of the Old West.

Louis L’Amour is wonderful author whose books I’ve enjoyed for many years. Even someone who doesn’t enjoy his stories could benefit from reading his autobiography “The Education of a Wandering Man”. His own life experiences, self-acquired education from reading books, and the stories he heard firsthand from the old cowboys and miners he worked with in the 1920’s and 1930’s are all reflected in the landscapes, characters, and stories he created in his books.

In one of his books that I read last week (“Under the Sweetwater Rim”), the hero makes some observations that resonated with me. Sitting out a storm in the mountains, he observes:

“This storm will make changes, most of them small. But seeds fall into cracks and plants grow up to spread the cracks wider with their roots. Rain washes in, snow melts, the winter freezes, and the cracks in the rocks expand. There’s no end to it, and here we can see it happening. There’s a majesty to it, a timeless sort of beauty…I think we should all go into the mountains more often. We should stand alone and look on the peaks and the valleys..."

Another time he sits by a lakeshore watching the flowers and grass blowing in the wind, and reflects:

“…when a man lives with a gun beside him, he comes to savor every moment if he has any sensitivity at all. The trouble is that most of us live in anticipation or in memory, never in the present moment. There must always be times like this when you just still sit and listen, feel, see. You live longer and live infinitely better.”

I guess that about sums up the way I feel myself. :-)