Desperate for a good night’s sleep
My husband has a cough, and it’s keeping us both up all night
When I made my wedding vows in 2017, I promised to love my husband in sickness and in health. This week I’ve changed my mind and added a clause that I will love him in all sickness except coughing, particularly the type of coughing that keeps him and me awake for 12 long nights.
I have always needed a good night’s sleep. I go to bed early, get up early, and more often than not, wake up feeling well rested and ready for the day. But not recently. For the past few weeks, I’ve been a shadow of my former self. And it’s all because of Chris’s cough.
It’s not just a meek little cough but a deep, hacking cough that is so loud it shakes the house. Each night, I’ll climb into bed, hopeful for a restful night. And each night, just as I’m gently nodding off, Chris coughs, jolting me awake. After a few minutes, we’ll both settle down again—my eyelids heavy, sleep calling. Then the barking resumes.
‘I can’t go on like this,’ I told my mum. ‘I can’t live like this.’
‘He’s not well,’ she said. ‘Where’s your sympathy?’
‘I do have sympathy, and I’d have a lot more if only I could sleep.’
All last week, I stumbled through my daily life in a sleep deprived fog, my brain and body struggling to connect.
On Monday morning, I staggered to my desk for a 9am online meeting. When the Zoom room opened, I shrieked in shock.
Who is that puffy-eyed woman?
It was me.
So, at 10am, when it was time to present a webinar, I reduced my video to the size of a postage stamp. I didn’t want the participants to endure the horror of me in full-screen mode.
Thankfully, there were no meetings on Tuesday. It was just me at my desk, trying to put one word in front of the other. But no matter how much I bashed at the keyboard, the words wouldn’t come. My brain hurt with the effort, and my head kept nodding forward, desperate for sleep. I abandoned writing and spent the day deleting the five million emails in my inbox instead.
Wednesday was an important day. I had a job interview, a second-round interview where I needed to do a presentation, answer questions and take a written test.
‘I need a good night’s sleep.’ I’d practically begged Chris. ‘Please, can you stop the coughing?’
Despite downing half a bottle of Benylin, he still coughed, although a little less ferociously.
As there was a train strike on Wednesday, I had to drive to Manchester, leaving early and taking the scenic route across the Pennines. It wasn’t until I reached the top of Holme Moss that I realised I’d put on the wrong dress. It should have been a red and black dress to match my black blazer, shoes and bag. The dress I was wearing was blue and didn’t match anything.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I told myself. ‘They’re not employing me for my fashion sense.’
Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t turn back. With the trains cancelled, it seemed like everyone was on the road. I crawled through Tintwistle, arriving in Manchester only half an hour before my interview.
All I had to do was park, but I took a wrong turn and then another, trying to ignore the rising panic that I’d be late. Finally, with twenty minutes to go, I pulled into a Q-Park and breathed a sigh of relief.
I’d made it.
Except there was nowhere to park. I inched my way around the two-storeys, taking deep breaths and trying to stay optimistic that a spot would become available.
With ten minutes left, a woman pulled out of one of the electric car bays. I don’t have an electric car and thought I might get a fine for parking there, but I had no other choice. It was the tightest car parking space that I have ever reversed into, but I squeezed in, parked, and ran.
I arrived at the office with five minutes to spare but felt so utterly exhausted I considered aborting the interview and getting my head down on one of the comfy-looking sofas in reception.
Before I could, the interviewers ushered me into a small meeting room where the heating had been cranked up so much it was like being in a sauna. When I did my presentation, it felt like it wasn’t me talking — as though I was watching and listening to myself saying a lot of words that didn’t really make much sense.
The next task was to write a news story in 25 minutes. The room was so hot, my makeup was sliding off my face. Next came the questions and although I tried, I was so unbelievably exhausted that I struggled to even remember my name.
‘How many members do you write for in your current organisation?’ the HR director asked.
I looked at her blankly, while the number I have known inside out and back to front for the past five years vanished from my mind.
Nothing.
Who am I?
What am I doing with my life?
What are my career ambitions?
I don’t know anymore. I just want to sleep.
I left the interview feeling even more drained. On the way home, to keep myself awake, I listened to the radio. At one point, the presenter was talking about a one-hundred-day cough that has been doing the rounds.
Panic shot through every part of my body: one hundred days means one hundred nights.
How would I survive?
That night, as I snuggled down in bed, I thought of our wedding vows.
In sickness and in health.
I love my husband dearly and would never ask for a divorce or a temporary 100-day separation. I felt bad asking him to move into the spare room. I would have to endure.
As the coughing started, I pulled the duvet over my head. Only another 88 days to go.
This reminded me of the panic Macbeth goes into when he thinks that, as well as murdering the king, he has 'murdered sleep'. He thinks he will never sleep again and he was right to be upset about that. I hope your husband's cough abates soon. You can't go on like that!
Oh, this is so rough. It's rare I can't just sleep over my spouse coughing or snoring, but it's the worst when it happens. Really good ear plugs (silicone ones, not foam) really help, as does a sofa on another floor in a pinch!