Isn’t it amazing the difference that a little sleep can bring? Just prior to surgery, a breast cancer survivor sent me an email to make sure I had lots of pillows. I happen to be a person who regularly purchases new pillows in search of the perfect pillow, so I thought I was set. It turns out that there are not enough pillows in the universe to get comfortable in bed the first few nights after surgery.

When I first came home from the hospital, I knew that getting comfortable in bed might be a problem, but it had to be better than the hospital, right? What I didn’t anticipate was how restricted my sleeping positions would be. I couldn’t sleep on my left side because the port area (near my shoulder) was incredibly tender. I couldn’t sleep on my left side because the drain was in the way and the suture area under my arm was sore. I had to sleep on my back. I tossed, I turned, I whimpered, and I finally got up around 4 a.m. to rest in the chair.

On my second night home, I decided that there had to be a better solution. I created a cocoon of pillows and tried to crawl into the hollow. Pillows under my arms, pillows under my knees, pillows everywhere. It was incredibly comfortable for about two minutes. Then I realized why those silk worms always morph into moths in order to get out of this constricting cocoon! Back to the chair I go.

The one bright spot in these sleepless mornings was the opportunity to have long talks with my mother. She hasn’t been sleeping either since the death of my father six weeks ago. So we set up a system. When I would get up between 2 and 4 a.m., I would turn on the lights to the stairway. If she woke up and saw the lights, she would come up and talk to me. We spent hours talking during the week of her visit. We talked about our fears and frustrations. We talked about our crazy relatives and our perfect dogs. We talked about breast cancer and death and hope and survival. I would gladly give up sleep to have these conversations again.

Sleep is becoming a bit easier. Some nights I sleep five or six hours, some nights I only get a few hours. But I have stopped measuring the nights by the number of hours and more by how I feel when I wake up. I suspect that I will have plenty of time to sleep during chemo.