Almost forgot!
    A few less days than a week ago, when I was researching lung cancer on the web looking for indications that my mother was declining, one of the search strings I used was "'lung cancer'"+sleep+problems". I was looking for indications that people with lung cancer tended to increase their sleep quotient as their cancer progressed. This, however, wasn't the "lung cancer sleep problem" to which I was directed. I was, instead, overwhelmed with article after article mentioning the prevalence of sleep disturbances (varieties of sleep apnea) and its effect on quality and length of life during lung cancer progression. Although I perused several of the articles into the third search page, unfortunately, since this wasn't the information I was seeking, I didn't bookmark any of the pages. However, one article piqued my continued curiosity and contemplation. It mentioned that when these sleep disturbances were successfully treated so that the person with the difficulties could enjoy restful sleep, the result was usually a longer than expected and higher quality of life. The article opined that this happened because cancer puts unusual systemic stress on one's body, especially lung cancer, because of its obvious pulmonary involvement and the pulmonary system being what "inspires" life. Thus, restful sleep, within which stress is managed and its debilitating effects alleviated, had an acute healing effect on people with lung cancer.
    At the time I read this I paid little attention. Over the next few days, though, this information coagulated itself into a supposition about my mother's lung cancer experience and her years-long prodigious sleep quotient. Let me preface by saying that for some years I've worried about the amount of sleep she packs under her belt, sometimes tried to manage it downward, usually unsuccessfully, and have even, at times, attributed health difficulties to her extraordinary capacity for sleep and, as well, worried that it was taking her out of life, as well as shortening her life. I've written about this, occasionally, here in these journals. This article, though, puts me in mind that, considering how long she's probably been nurturing her lung cancer, maybe her staunch insistence on getting all the sleep she feels she needs, however unreasonable it has seemed to me, is one of the primary reasons why she's still here, still engaged in life.
    A long, long time ago, long before I became involved with my mother in as direct a manner as I've been since December, 1993, I remember wondering, simply and with much unsupported naivete, if, the more one sleeps, the longer one is likely to live simply because sleep is a way of moderating the stresses of Waking Life, to inappropriately appropriate a title. I never attempted to confirm or exclude this, I've just kept it tucked away in my "Possible Life Dicta" pseudo-intellectual Grey Pocket. Another one of those pseudo-intellectual Grey Sub-Pockets is devoted to the Dictum that sleeping with animals (in our case, kitties) is a particularly healing experience. This Dictum provokes me to often note, with pleasure, the presence of one or two kitties on my mother's bed when she has had a difficult period of wakefulness.
    So, you know, I wonder...I'm just wondering...
    Almost time to experimentally rouse The Mom.
    Later.
- posted by Gail Rae @ 12:57   email  this post