In At The Deep End

I was tired today; this isn’t the first day I’ve been tired. It struck me that there are many different types of tired, but they all get labelled with a standard name: tired. Eskimos are supposed to have many names for snow, so maybe parents at least should have more than one name for tired, to pin-point precisely the particular kind of tired you’re feeling today - a bit like tracking down just the right species of moth in a museum’s display case. Ah yes! It’s an Epiphyas postvittana kind of day.

I’m probably missing a few of these as I’ve not been a junior doctor or used large amounts of mood influencing chemicals stronger than tea. Nevertheless, here’s a few kinds of tired that I’ve thought of:

• Cotton wool head - does exactly what it says on the tin. Your head feels like it’s full of cotton wool which stops the thoughts from flowing. No headache or grumpiness.
• Border-line psychotic - I am a guided missile heading for sleep NOW. Anything that gets between me and sleep will get flattened. Social interaction usually fails painfully, limited thinking is possible but nothing is pleasant.
• Switching off - parts of your brain just seem to not work, but you’re too tired to care. No headache or cotton-wool feeling.
• Shredded - unpleasant, as it feels like some important and sensitive part of your brain has been rubbed against a cheese grater.
• Grey - a background tiredness that has peaks and troughs added where you can’t concentrate on anything e.g. work. When in the troughs, web browsing - infinitely distracting yourself - suddenly becomes very attractive.
• Glandular fever - don’t try this at home, kids.
• Head in a vice - head feels squashed, often with an ache at the base of the head.
• Spatula - you need to exert a tremendous amount of will power and mentally scrape yourself off the floor with a spatula, then stagger through the day on auto-pilot.
• Fading in and out - you’re reading your children bedtime stories and realise you’ve been saying words that aren’t in the book and now your eyes are closed. Awake with a jerk and then carry on with the story. Repeat until the book is finished or the children go and ask Mummy instead.

I think today was a switching off kind of day. Fortunately the bits that didn’t work didn’t seem to matter!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 12:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.