This morning I woke up somewhere in the wee, DARK hours of the night some time between going to sleep and getting up for the day. It's a common occurrence for folks of the senior generation and it is not uncommon for it to happen several times a night. At some point after falling asleep you become aware of your brain tapping at the insides of your eyelids while whispering, "Helloooooooo, your bladder is sending out a 'To Go' call so you need to wake up." I often try to ignore this annoying call but then I realize that if I don't get up right then I may very well end up changing the sheets on the bed at a very inconvenient time.
This was the case this morning and so I got up, staggered to the bathroom and staggered back into the bedroom, congratulating myself that I had managed to not check the clock, not awaken the overactive part of my brain or make any unauthorized stops at the fridge. All was good with the world and it should be an easy transition back into sleep.
I had just crawled back under the covers when a small voice addressed me from the far side of the bed. What you must understand here is that I wear hearing aids during my waking hours because I found early on that I can not understand half of what The Man says. Whether it is the pitch of his voice or just the fact that he is soft spoken I was forever asking him to repeat himself until I got what he was saying.
I do NOT wear my hearing aids to bed !
And so when the tiny little voice spoke to me in the middle of the very dark bedroom in the middle of the night I could only assume it was The Man asking me something stupid. (He is notorious for waiting until I am just falling asleep before asking me what we will have for dinner the next day. Most times I try to ignore him because if I were to respond it would not be done so in a loving manner). But because The Man has such lousy lungs and heart I am always alert to the fact that there could be a medical issue that needs taking care of immediately. With that thought in mind I sat up and asked what he had said because naturally I couldn't actually hear him. He repeated what ever he had said so, thinking it must be something important, I got up, walked around the bed in the dark, leaned in close and asked him to repeat AGAIN what it was that he needed. This is what he said . . . "Do you have any lotion?" At this point I honestly thought he was still asleep and dreaming so I just said "Nooooooooooooooo, why do you need lotion?" (I really thought this would either wake him completely or he would just roll over and go back to sleep. Neither happened ! The voice in the dark told me that he was itchy and needed some lotion.
Now I am all for taking good care of The Man but this was pushing the limit of my generosity. I once again told him I did not have any lotion to which he replied, "Can you get some?" If I could have seen anything in the dark I might have picked up a shoe and hit him with it but instead I told him to wait a minute while I staggered into the kitchen to get a bottle of hand lotion that sits by the sink. Bringing the lotion back into the still very dark bedroom I held it out in his general direction fully expecting him to reach out and take it. Nothing happened. I asked if he still needed the lotion, thinking he had indeed fallen back to sleep but that was only wishful thinking. The next thing he said was, " I need you to rub the lotion 'here' ". Not knowing where "here" was and not being able to see or even want to see what he was pointing at I asked if I should turn on the light, to which he agreed.
Backing up a bit, two days before our night time adventure The Man had been complaining about a sore back so I had suggested we put a medicated menthol patch on his back where he was feeling discomfort. It seemed to do the trick and he was quite happy that the pain disappeared and he felt much better. I did not realize that he left the patch on for more than 24 hours.
So . . . when I turned on the light in the middle of the night last night there was The Man, rolled onto his side with his shirt pulled up to show me just where he was itchy. Anyone care to guess just where his back was itching? For such a tough guy The Man has the skin of a 3 month old baby.
I must confess that I did get some perverse gratification from his sharp intake of breath when I squirted the ice cold lotion on the middle of his back. Not nice on my part but by now I had lost my window of opportunity to fall immediately back to sleep once I took care of The Man and his itch. (Not to be confused with the other "itches" that men tend to get.)
From the sound of his breathing The Man had no difficulty getting back to sleep while I lay there for quite some time thinking about just how I was going to blog about the latest misadventure with The Man.
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