The Nights Are the Longest Part

Nobody warns you about the nights. The days you can fill. You can distract yourself, you can get on with things, you can be busy enough that it sits somewhere in the background. Then the house goes quiet, the pump starts, and it is just you and the sound of it for the next twelve hours.

For a long while I fought it. I lay there listening for every beep, half waiting for something to go wrong, running through everything I had done that evening to check I had not missed a step. I got up in the morning more tired than when I went to bed, and then spent the day dreading the next one. It became a cycle that fed itself.

What eventually shifted was accepting that the night is part of the treatment rather than an interruption to it. That sounds like a small distinction and it is not. As long as I thought of the feed as the thing stealing my sleep, I was going to lie there resenting it until morning. Once it was simply what happened at night, the resentment had nowhere to go.

Small practical things helped more than I expected. Getting the line tucked and settled before I lay down rather than fidgeting with it after. A radio on low, just enough to stop the room being silent. Most of all, learning exactly what each alarm actually meant, so that a beep became information instead of a fright. Once you properly understand the machine, it stops feeling like it is the one in charge.

If your nights are hard at the minute, that is not a failure on your part and it is not something you are doing wrong. It is genuinely one of the toughest parts of all this, and it takes as long as it takes. It does settle, though. Mine did, and the mornings got easier along with it.