Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Getting Back To A Normal Life

September 9, 2011 by Beth

Apparently my ability to blog about anything but the game lasted all of one day.

It’s been four days since the game ended and I’m feeling both like I may never fully recover and like it was all just a dream! My physical injuries are all very surface – blisters and abrasions  – and I’m a fast healer when it comes to stuff like that and my sausage fingers only lasted for about a day after the game. I had dinner with about 25 of the players last night ((Big time props to Richport Ford Lincoln who kicked in a bunch of money for dinner!)) and many people have much more serious issues – groin pulls, toes that are still numb, etc.! But I also am still having trouble temperature regulating – I’m hot, then I’m cold – and I can’t seem to get hydrated. Despite the fact that I am drinking crazy amounts of water all day long, none of it seems to want to stay in my body ((I’ve also tried beer, but that doesn’t seem to work either))! I feel like I’m ever so slightly more hydrated than yesterday, but my mouth and my eyes still feel super dry! If we do this again, I feel like we should have physiologists follow us around to study the effects of insane amounts of physical activity ((Yeah, I just suggested that we might do this again. Near the end of the game, when people would ask me if I’d ever do this again, I would say, “No way. I’ll volunteer, but playing in a 10 day long hockey game is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” Now that we are a few days out, I feel like I might do it again if they were to plan another game like this!)). On the plus side, I have regained the ability to sweat, which I lost around Day 5 of the game. So that’s got to be a good thing, right?

My main problem now is that I’m still suffering from the sleep deprivation – hence why I’m at home writing a blog posting on a Friday night instead of partying it up like a respectable 30-something should be. Now, I’m no stranger to sleep-deprivation. I usually only sleep about 5 hours a night during the week, so getting only 5 hours sleep per day during the hockey game wasn’t as much a problem for me as it was for some others… for a few days. But in the real world, I typically make up for my insufficient sleep during the week by sleeping 10 or 12 hours per night on the weekends, something I certainly didn’t do during the game! I’m also not usually physically active for 9 hours per day while getting only 5 hours of sleep per night, so the sleep deprivation *definitely* caught up with me. And since I went back to work the day after the game ended, I haven’t gotten nearly enough sleep to start catching up. In fact, I was in a meeting today and the chair asked us to talk about our goals for the meeting – her example was “By the end of the meeting, I want a consensus on this document so that we can submit it to the Director – and I said, “My goal is to stay awake for the next two hours” ((Fortunately, my coworkers have a sense of humour and are sympathetic to my plight!)).

My plan for the weekend is to take it easy – early to bed tonight, a day on the beach tomorrow and definitely sleeping in big time on Sunday. Hopefully by Sunday I’ll have enough energy to actually get groceries – something I just haven’t had the strength to do as of yet. Maybe next week I’ll even unpack all my stuff from the game, which is currently sitting in a giant pile in my living room!

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