When my wife and I first started spending the night together, I had minimal knowledge of her troubled history with sleep. She cautioned that once she took her night meds she’d be zonked out, which indeed was the case, but she judiciously omitted a few piquant details that I’d have to encounter myself in due time. There were, for example, the dream conversations she holds aloud, often consisting of rapid-fire medical jargon or conducted entirely in German (not a restful language for someone such as myself, with a dog-eared childhood copy of The Jewish Catastrophe in Europe). More startling were the piercing shrieks and shouts, accompanied by air-shoves or flying fists; reactions to nightmares and flashbacks from which she’d awaken in a cold sweat, breathless and nauseated.
Bunking with Crankenstein is not for the faint of heart. The morning after our first night together, she said she’d never slept so well. I’d rarely slept as poorly, even though she’d been quite subdued by her standards. She has the most exhausting sleep, both physically and mentally, of anyone I’ve ever known, and without medication she has no sleep at all. Mine is as light as hers is deep, and has been reliably interrupted since childhood by Crohn’s and its attendant sacroiliac pain. If we have a sick pet or leaky roof, I get up to deal with it as she kicks, snores, recites “Der Erlkönig” and seizes custody of my abandoned blankets. It was an arrangement that worked for much of our relationship, until the quality of my sleep began to decline in recent years and my resentment of her obscenely bountiful sleep — and the ruckus emanating from her side of the bed — flourished.
A change of location only occasionally helped. Whether I was in our room, the guest room or sprawled on the couch, sleep eluded me. Noises that hadn’t bothered me before, like wind whipping at the windows, became intolerable overnight, causing such distress that even Crankenstein took notice. “What’s wrong?” she’d groggily murmur, reaching for my hand as if she could lead me back to unconsciousness. The aural disturbances didn’t end there. We have a brittle old house that’s louder than a bowl of Rice Krispies, and the faintest snaps and pops from the far corners of another floor would startle me awake. Previously, I primarily had myoclonic jerks as I drifted off to sleep; now I was usually drifting, rather than actually sleeping, and jerking all the while.
It was only within the last few weeks, after seeing a movement disorder specialist and recording myself overnight for several evenings, that we belatedly realized the extent of my sleep disturbance. My legs move continually, flexing at the knee every couple minutes and forming blanket tents that come and go while Crankenstein obliviously flings herself hither and yon beside me. Everything that’s been plaguing me nocturnally in recent years is likely related to that, including strange feelings of almost primal desperation and panicked anger when I awaken prematurely. And it’s all probably pieces of the same puzzle as my other recent motor issues. While the MDS figures that out, I can’t help but ponder the bizarre scenes that play out nightly in my marital bed, and the absurdity of this bit of trivia: ‘Our’ song, if you can believe it, is the Five Satins’ doo-wop classic “In the Still of the Night.”