THE DAWN TREADER
Gemma Fullam
Late August, 1986. My bleary-eyed 15-year-old self was in waspish form as I disembarked the bus on which I’d just spent a disagreeable three days and nights, along with my mother, sister and a motley crew of holidaymakers headed home.
Our sojourn in a Costa Brava caravan park was now a memory, along with the taste of warm beer and the wet, probing tongue of a Spanish boy called Miguel. We had survived the hellish coach trek to arrive, finally, at the ferry port of Roscoff.
Having endured sub-standard kip for the previous 72 hours, the instant our cabins were assigned, I was into the top bunk faster than you could say ‘anchors aweigh’, and awoke, refreshed, a day later, to a double revelation: we were circling in the ocean, still far from home, and a pervading stench of vomit and disinfectant percolated the decks. My mother enlightened me: Hurricane Charley had hit, and I had slept entirely through it.
It’s 2020. Any month, any day. I check the time: 4.20am. In an hour, it will be time to get up for work. I have not slept. An entire night without rest is becoming a frequent vicissitude; one that is making me feel increasingly powerless.
The cause of my insomnia? Restless leg syndrome, a condition whose severity is belied by its Python-esque name, and is endured by one in 10 Irish people. My RLS comes with a side of periodic limb movement disorder, so not only do I experience a hideous crawling sensation in my gams, they also thrash about as my muscles involuntarily contract and release, sometimes thousands of times a night.
Sleeping is nigh impossible, no matter how exhausted I might be. I once viewed my bed as a refuge, a place of escape from the day’s trials; now, though, it is a battleground where I am nightly subjected to a torture that leaves me at the mercy of a ratcheting anxiety and prisoner to an out-of-control carcass that refuses to recognise the circadian rhythms it is meant to obey. My husband has long ago left for the spare room — the absence of his comforting presence is the collateral damage of one kick too many.
This enforced insomnia has me teetering on the brink of madness: I fantasise about hacking off my legs to get some kip. I tie painfully tight tourniquets around my calves, hoping the pain will bring reprieve from the uncontrollable crawl-jerking. My limbs flail and twitch like one in death-throes, but “the death of each day’s life” eludes me, and I am condemned to endure a sort of twilight half-life, never fully awake and never fully asleep.
Most nights, I admit defeat and walk the halls of my home like a ghost, the upright movement bringing temporary respite to my weary legs. I zombie-shuffle, my head drooped to my chest with tiredness, as I see, yet again, night’s blackness morph into the blue light of dawn.
It wasn’t always this bad; 20 years ago, my RLS was an annoying twitch that would occur occasionally, but often at inopportune times. The first time I can recall being discommoded was during the latter half of a West End production of Stones in his Pockets, which I endured with gritted teeth and a jiving limb, willing the curtain to fall so that I could stand, thus ending the torture. My father has it too — it can run in families — but while his is a mild version, mine has morphed over the years into a severely discombobulating condition that impacts the entirety of my life. It happens when I am sitting — I spent the majority of a flight from Japan pacing the back of the cabin, half-dead with fatigue — and when I retire at night. The twitching comes out of the blue, and can switch from one leg to the other; it can include my arms and my lower back; the spasms are worse, I find, if I am sick.
Without sleep-fuel, the brain does not function at its optimum, and the effects of long-term insomnia are far from benign. Pre-coronavirus, my working-week routine was to rise at 5.20am, leaving an hour later, for a 20-minute drive to the railway station and the remainder of my commute. Recently, I found myself on the wrong side of the road, in the path of an oncoming car, having fallen into a micro-sleep. On that occasion, quick reflexes spared me from a collision, but there were seconds in it, and I was left shaken and terrified, shot through with adrenaline, and feeling even more helpless in the grip of what has become a waking nightmare.
When sleep does come, it arrives around 7am. This means I sleep late into the day for that part of the week I am not working, wasting my hours of freedom in exhausted slumber; while in my new lockdown working-from-home world, I must get up at 7.30am, so am drifting off just as the alarm cruelly beeps me into weary wakefulness.
Everyone has unasked-for advice to proffer when I tell them the reason I cannot sleep, and I usually manage a tight smile when, in fact, I want to tell them to fuck off.
“Don’t you think I’ve tried it all?” I want to scream. Meditation, magnesium, breathing exercises, sound baths, alcohol, no alcohol, no caffeine, hot baths, cold showers, medication, sleeping pills, exercise, lavender, CBD oil, cannabis, celery juice, counting sheep — nothing works, long-term anyway. My mother, bless her, recently proffered transcribed lines from Louise Hay’s book, Heal Your Body, in which the late self-help guru offers mental causes for physical illnesses. “Our legs carry us forward in life. Leg problems indicate a fear of moving forward...” Fear has been a lifelong companion, so Hay may have hit on something. My mam also noted the healing affirmation, which I must recite 100 times a day: “I move forward with confidence and joy, knowing that all is well in my future”. Let’s hope the legs are listening.
While there is nothing that seems to make my RLS better, there are triggers I now know to avoid. Excessive heat sets it off, so I sleep with light covers and my window open; some wines seem to spark spasms, and gluten has shown itself to be an irritant. I am not one of those people who runs to the GP at every sniffle, quite the opposite. But on this I have sought help, and two medications in, have not found any pharmaceutical holy grail. It is an area in which I proceed with the utmost caution, as some pills can cause a rebound phenomenon called augmentation, leaving one in a worse state than before.
This a story with no happy ending, but I remain hopeful, perhaps foolishly so. Without hope, I could not cope. It is eternally surprising to me what the human spirit can endure. Beckett’s oft-quoted words elegantly express the gritty resolve for which I dig deep almost nightly: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on”. Indeed.
Once, I could sleep through a hurricane. These nights, I ride the charley horse of the apocalypse, praying vainly for the destination to be the sweet oblivion of sleep.