My Christmas Night Terror

Well, I won't have any pictures tonight, but I do have a funny and true story.

Last Christmas was the first time I was put on oxygen at home. It's really something you have to get used to. At night I have to sleep with the canula attached and I've found it very difficult to go to sleep being "tethered."

Christmas night I was exhausted. It had been a long, albeit fun, day and I fell into bed just worn out. My husband was already asleep, but he heard me crawl into bed and said I was asleep immediately.

In my sleep I felt my canula tubing and wondered what it was. I followed it with my hand and found it was dangling down from a hole in the ceiling. Looking up, I saw a large hole in the ceiling with a man about to descend and repel down. Now, in this night-terror, my husband was away and I was home alone with my son.

I was terrorized that this man was in our home, so I jumped up from the bed and started running, screaming "Get out! Get out of the house!" at the top of my lungs. (This, of course, broke my canula, since I was tethered to the machine!) Running into the kitchen to the phone, I could hear heavy footsteps running behind me and a man yelling. This, of course, was my husband. But in my night-terror my husband wasn't home so I thought it was the man about to get me.

This made me more frantic so that when I grabbed the phone to call for help, I dropped it. The man almost had me, so I took off again running to my son's room.

"R! Get out of the house! R! Get out of the house!"

Just outside R's room I wiped out on the hardwood floor and fell. That's where my husband caught up with me and gathered me up in his arms.

And that's when I finally woke up. Only I was very confused and dazed. When you are woke from a night-terror, it makes you feel like you are in the middle of it and it is so very real. I was trembling for the next half hour, I had a HUGE hematoma on my right knee and one on the back of a hand. A year later, my knee is STILL sore. I had several bruises on other parts of my body, too. How I got any of them, I don't know. I guess when I was running through the house at break-neck speed in the dark, I hit every cotton-pickin' thing in the house.

And scared the tar out of my husband! (My son slept through the whole thing!)

Laugh if you want, but for a while after that I would be afraid of the dark if my husband wasn't home.