The best bridge between despair and hope...

...is a good night's sleep, they say.

They also say, "don't burn bridges."

Two nights ago, I couldn't sleep. I can't really point to the reason, but I just couldn't sleep. "They say" insomnia is a common complication of cancer treatment. "They say" it can last for years. I made it through the night and the next day, though. I used to sleep 4 or 5 hours a night for weeks on end - and that's a maximum. It wasn't as easy as it used to be, but I made it through.

Then last night, sometime around one am, when I could barely hold my eyes open, I got the hiccups. For the last few weeks, I've been getting these bouts of hiccups that seem to have no cause (although that's fairly common), but new for me, they also seem to have no cure.

Fast forward to 3:45 am - less than 12 hours ago. I'm laying on my back on the couch, still hiccuping, with tears streaming down my face and filling my ears. For many years - the last couple of decades or so, anyway - I've lived with night terrors born of my past. As a result, for most of my adult life, I never really enjoyed a "good" night's sleep, not on a regular basis. Except for a four or five month period before my cancer diagnosis. My life and my state of mental health aligned in such a way that I began sleeping through the night. Every night. For nights on end. Then I had to get a breast cut off, and that screwed everything up.

Now, two years later, my surgery wounds are healed, but chemical menopause, acid washes (I refuse to call them hot flashes any more), and an apparently malfunctioning diaphragm rob me again and again and again. "They say" the best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep.

I wish my bridge was more than a precarious, Indiana Jones-esque, frayed rope mockery of a contraption.