Last night was my last night of hospital duty as I am off to Siargao for the weekend and my dad should be discharged tomorrow anyway. From the time he was confined on Saturday night, his readmission on Sunday night up to last night, the only time I’ve slept in my own bed was on Monday night.

Which means that I am massively sleep deprived.

If you’ve spent any time in a hospital, you’ll know what I’m talking about. There’s always someone knocking on the door, almost every hour on the hour. If it’s not a nurse wanting to take a blood sample, it’s another nurse with a blood pressure gauge. Sometimes, it’s the security guard, reminding you to keep your door locked while he barges in, or the janitor coming to clean out the porta potty. I’ve come to regard hospital personnel as sleep deprivation torture specialists.

Not that I need much sleep.

There was a time when I could sleep through anything. You couldn’t wake me up even if the house was on fire.

No longer. I’ve become extremely sensitive to light and sound. If there’s even a vampire light on in the room, I’ll be tossing and turning the whole night. I’ve started switching my mobile phone to silent mode as, if it so much as vibrates, I’ll wake up and that’ll be the end of any decent sleep I’ll be getting.

I’m not sure when this started but it’s been going on for the past few years. I’m sure smoking one to two packs a day didn’t help.

At it’s worst, I was sleeping half an hour during the day and half hour at night. But it, eventually, stabilized to an average of four hours a night.

Believe it or not, there were advantages to not needing much sleep. First, was that I became both a day and a night person. I’d get up at five or six in the morning and, while the getting up part was always rough, once I was up, I’d plow straight into my day. And I could keep going till the evening, then go even past that till it was time to start all over again.

Another advantage is that I never felt jet lagged. I once walked off a plane in Paris and went straight to the bars, partying till the wee hours of the morning, and did the same on the way back to Manila.

When I was working in Bucharest (and I use the word “working” very loosely here as there wasn’t much work going on at that time), someone I was partying with asked if I ever slept. I told him, “Sleep is for the dead,” – which, come to think of it, was a rather ironic thing to say in Romania.

But now that I’ve quit smoking and changed my policy on napping, I’ve been getting more rest. (I used to be anti-napping, thinking that it would interfere with my ability to sleep in the evening. Pfft. I still couldn’t sleep even if I stayed awake the whole day. Now I sleep whenever I feel the need).

I must be averaging six hours a night now and, sometimes, I even manage heavy sleep and no longer wake up at the slightest sound or glimmer of light.

I still wake up before the alarm clock goes off though. I hate being jarred awake and, almost always, wake up a good 30 minutes before the alarm goes off – just so that I can turn it off. To paraphrase a friend’s Facebook status update, it does lend a certain satisfaction akin to detonating a time bomb.

But whenever the situation merits, I can still get by on as little sleep as possible. The last time I had gotten any decent sleep before Monday was on Thursday. Although last night, when I finally dozed off at around four in the morning, I must have been extremely tired as, much to my chagrin, I didn’t hear my dad get up to use the toilet and the poor thing had to fend for himself.

I did wake up two and a half hours later and have had a few naps since but, now that I’m back home, I am feeling groggy and will have to call it a night soon. I’ll be doing the early morning Luzon-Visayas-Mindanao (Manila → Cebu → Siargao) airport crawl tomorrow and haven’t packed!

Before I go, I’ll leave you with the song, “The Lodgers”, from The Style Council.

Sweet dreams. 🙂