A dream passes quickly through my mind...ever increasing in its attempt to keep me captivated. I want to stay there yet I cannot. Reality beckons, it doesn't know the dark of night from the light of day...and I rise. The dream disappears as if an etch-a-sketch was my palette...never to flurry through my slumber again.
The faint glow of Ella's room guides me to her. She is still crying, screaming, or just whimpering for one of us to come in and care for her; anything from a simple body rotation to a more complicated hidden pain or discomfort. Between parent and child the task is completed. As she wanders off into her sleep I stay and watch her stats (oxygenation & heart rate) to make sure she is deeply asleep. The walk back to our bedroom is tenuous as I wonder if I will make it back under the covers before she cries out again.
It varies, but sometimes it's easy to for me to get back to sleep and other times it's not. Either way, the sleep has been disrupted and most likely will be again; two, three, maybe even six times in one night.
Falling back asleep and barely reaching another dream, the blackness of night is once again all I can see, broken only by the faint glow of Ella's light and the sound of her voice. Once again...I work my way back to her room...once again.
This scenario played itself over and over...night after night, week after week, month after month, and year after year. Lindsay and I felt that the actual act of dreaming was a experience only held in the past. Yes, we probably did dream-- yet once sleep is interrupted it was as if the dreams decided to not bother visiting us anymore. The release a body feels from good dreams has eluded us for so long.
Ella now has a night nurse 5 days a week. She arrives at 10:00pm and leaves at 6:00am. She cares for Ella while we sleep. And while the transition has been a bit rough things are starting to smooth themselves out. We have actually had some complete nights of uninterrupted sleep...and better yet, the dreams that seemingly flurried away from us are drifting back. The dreams are "complete" (as dreams go) and seem to be "in color". I once again experience people "talking" in my dreams. And if, by chance, we are woken up by our youngest daughter, it's only to open our eyes slightly, knowing that her nurse is right there for her. In a matter of minutes Ella is quietly sleeping again and our dreams silently await us, await our slumber, await to grant us their form of release.
