Things that go bump in the night

It is no secret that over the Spring and Summer I had a long stretch of sleep issues. My usually rock solid sleeping patterns were disrupted. I couldn’t fall asleep, or when I did I would wake up in the middle of the night and be up for hours.

Over time it resolved, and now that the weather is cooler and my life is getting a little more sorted out, I am sleeping very soundly again. Which is fantastic. I love to sleep.

Except.

Sometimes.

Like when my cat breaks down the bedroom door and scares me half witless. When you think an intruder has broken in to kill you, for some reason it is really hard to get back to sleep. Stupid cat.

Or when I get an idea in the middle of the night that demands to be written down. I may never lose that. I sort of hope I never do. There is something a little bit exciting about having something so stuck in your head that you need to write it down immediately.

Occasionally I wake up because of what I think of as phantom pages. Working in IT, I did weeks of night-time on call duty for a long time. Sometimes I still wake up in a panic because I think I have gotten a page even though I haven’t had to be on call for several years.

And sometimes I wake up for…well…the sort of things that no one else would wake up for.

The other night, I woke up out of a dead to the world sleep because of a sudden need to verify that I had spelled the word dysfunctional correctly. Because it was o’dark-thirty, I attempted to explain to myself that it could be spelled dis-function or dys-function but I simply would not listen to myself. I got up, Googled it, and went back to bed.

Yes, I was right. Either way is fine.

Was this an emergency? Only to my unconscious mind. I used the word in the blog, and for whatever reason my brain decided that there was an urgent need for a late night spell check. My subconscious lets me fat-finger words all the time, so I am not sure what was so important about dysfunctional.

The irony that it is somewhat dysfunctional to wake up in the middle of the night to spell check dysfunction is not lost on me.

2 thoughts on “Things that go bump in the night”

  1. I get it…Working in IT causes me to become delusional at night…I may never recover. I cannot work out how the ADT thread from the Certify client will work it’s way through the engine, decide to create a new patient…or not, then match up with the ORD thread generated at the same time. How will they ever marry…who will join them? Dysfunctional…yes…perhaps they will pass like ships in the night. I want them to end up in the same bar on a moonlit night with a balmy island breeze caressing the edges of their segments…

    1. Perhaps all you need to do is have the Interface team integrate the Piña Colada song into the HL7 messages.

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