🕯️ Saturday Health Update: When Sleep Won’t Come Home

Some days, coffee helps… some days it adds to the issues.

Welcome to The Crippled Cryptid: Saturday Health Updates

Content Note:
These posts talk openly about chronic illness, disability, medical trauma, hospital visits, symptoms, and the unfiltered reality of living in a body that doesn’t always cooperate.

Mentions of: insomnia, medical procedures, and chronic pain.

Some weeks are soft reflections.
Some weeks are heavy.

Please check in with yourself before reading and come back when you’re in the right headspace. No one will ever judge you for skipping a post here.

We understand how heavy things can get.

If you’re new here, hi. I’m Sky.
Professional cryptid.
Unwilling amateur cyborg.
Occasional chronic illness and disability advocate.

Medically complex enough to make my chart look like a horror anthology.

I cope with sarcasm, stubborn hope, whatever snacks survived the week, and a concerning amount of coffee.
(I would tell you not to tell my cardiologist, but apparently, he thinks POTS is some sort of made up TikTok disease. That’s a conversation for another day.)

Most days are lived in a haunted meat suit with a questionable warranty and a long-standing feud with my nervous system.

I spend a lot of time in Bed Jail™, but I’m rarely alone.

Cast of Characters

Luna
Medical alert service dog.
Guardian. Enforcer. Tiny chaos gremlin with a medical degree she absolutely gave herself.

She’s the voice that says,
“Hey. Sit down.”

And when I ignore her, she upgrades to,
“Mumther, we are not negotiating with your bad decisions today.”

She’s the sassiest spirit guide there is.
And when you’re a cryptid who ignores red flags from your own body, you need a spirit guide with teeth.

Go ahead and think of her like a walking Sour Patch Kid with giant ears and a tail.

Sometimes I do.

M&M
My Player 2. My soft place to land.

She shows up with ginger ale, soup, and the kind of quiet strength that keeps the world from tipping sideways when my body tries to.

She gives the 90% when I only have 10%.
She reminds me that survival is still a team effort.

Even on the bad days, she’s there to remind me not to let them win.

This space is for:

Disability without apologies.
Chronic illness without inspiration porn.
Honesty without pretending it’s always neat, hopeful, or easy.

There will probably be dog hair involved.

If you’ve been here before, welcome back.
If you’re new, take a breath. You don’t have to prove anything to exist here.

Welcome to the Lunatic Café.

☕ This Week: Insomnia, Easter, & Coffee

Hello, and welcome to the weekend.

I hope your week was soft.
Or at least survivable.

I wish I could say I made it through in one piece, but you’d be allowed to call me a liar.

And that might be one thing I take from my newly found Irish roots thanks to Ancestry. Though it’s always been true about me, I hate being called a liar. Even when it’s warranted.

Fae? Who, me?

I haven’t been sleeping.

I don’t know why.

The Insomnia Spiral

Restless leg syndrome has been kicking my ass.

I’ll start to drift, and then it feels like something is trying to gnaw its way out from inside my legs.

No amount of movement helps.
No position fixes it.
Nothing settles it.

Sleeping pills don’t help.
Benadryl doesn’t help.
Even my night meds aren’t touching it.

It’s just… there.
Relentless.

The kind of tired where your bones feel hollow but your body refuses to power down.

So, I stay up late, scrolling on my phone or glued to my iPad working on stories.

Great for the word count. Killer for the Apple Watch that loves to roast your ghoul about her sleeping habits.

Luna on Night Shift

Luna has been on constant duty.

When I can’t sleep, she crawls close and does DPT on my legs or climbs up to rest her head on my chest.

Always checking. Always watching.
Always making sure her mama is okay.

She is, objectively, the Best Girl™.

But I think we all already knew that.

Right now, she’s staring at me from the living room doorway, because I told her not to lay back here while I worked this morning. It rained last night, and the air is cold, the floor is cold, and even though she has fur and a sweater, I don’t like the idea of her laying on it.

It makes me think one of my next projects should be bringing up one of the dog beds from the basement, our room, and putting it under the table where she likes to lay.

Not that she uses it downstairs. Even though she has multiple.

She still prefers the big bed with her humans.

So, losing one downstairs bed so she can snooze peacefully on the chilly backroom floor sounds like a healthy compromise.

Easter, Quietly

At first, I thought maybe it was Easter stress.
Wanting to make everything right. Wanting to show up well.
Wanting to give the Yard Yeti a little bit of our childhood holiday magic back.

But it’s been almost a week now, and the insomnia stayed.

Easter itself, though?
It was good.

We had ham, mashed potatoes, corn for BJ (the Yard Yeti), and brussel sprouts.

We all know the Yard Yeti avoided the brussel sprouts.
That just meant more for M&M and me.

We also watched Moonfall, which I absolutely plan to review.

The week itself was quiet.

Sleepless.
Restless.
But quiet.

Which means Bed Jail™ has been my destination more often than not.
Willingly.

And that is strange, because usually I avoid it if I can.

This is one of those weeks where I spend early mornings, the ones where I can’t sleep and can’t stand tossing and turning anymore, at the back table watching the birds, listening to them, and working on my writing.

Do I enjoy carrying the laptop up the stairs? No.

But I do enjoy seeing the brightly colored finches. The robins, and the occasional cardinal.

Evenings are spent buried under layers of blankets.

The reprieve here comes from the shows we’ve been watching. NOS4A2, suggested by the man Ancestry says is my father, because he understands that horror and spooky things 100% belong in my orbit. Especially after he found out how big of a Stephen King fan I am, and this was written by his son.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters gives us an episode every Friday, or if you time it just right, late Thursday night. A small “we survived the week” reward. I still can’t seem to accept that we have only 2 episodes left of the season.

And The Boys is back, which means chaos, crass humor, and asking “what the actual fuck” every two and a half seconds.

I also have my own quiet show, The Testaments, something I watch alone while the birds chatter and I work on my writing.

M&M won’t watch The Handmaid’s Tale. She says it’s too heavy, and she’s right. But with the state of the world, it feels important to me. Especially as someone who has read the books.

Medical Avoidance (and Why It Happened)

I skipped my hematologist appointment.

Go ahead, give me shit if you have to. I would understand.

I’m always telling people to take their meds, eat, drink water, and go to their doctors.

But after the hospital, I wasn’t ready to be stuck with needles again.
Especially not there.

They aren’t gentle.
Which is funny when you think about it. Because they’re a hematology and oncology office, and you’d think with the kinds of people they treat, they would be a little more gentle.

And they wouldn’t use the bloodwork I already had from the ER last week.

So, I cancelled, with the promise to reschedule.

Because the truth is:

My arms are still bruised.
My veins are still healing.

You need healthy veins to draw blood.
Not blown, collapsed, recovering ones.

And the honest truth is they should have been able to use last week’s results. It would have been the same test anyway. It always is.

And when an office refuses to use tools like ultrasound or vein finders, or won’t let you outsource to a hospital?

That’s not care.
That’s convenience pretending to be care.

And convenience isn’t always safe.

Not for everyone.

A Small Win

The thunderclap headaches are easing.

They’re quieter now.
Less frequent. Less brutal.

I can get through most days without feeling like I’ve been hit by something invisible and furious.

And that matters.
Truly.

I’ve been taking it slow. Power-loading water like it’s a resource I might lose access to, adding hydration packets or Buoy drops to almost everything I drink.

Am I saying this is all because I was dehydrated? No.

I carry a giant COLDEST™ water bottle everywhere. Covered in stickers, fully committed to the bit. It’s not just emotional support, it’s used constantly.

But if the hospital’s solution is fluids and a migraine cocktail, I can at least try to meet them halfway here.

Without the needles.
And without the medical gaslighting.

False Spring, Again

We’re somewhere in False Spring Part IV.

We skipped a few chapters, but here we are.

And still, there are signs:

Robins.
Finches.
Bright red cardinals at the feeder.

The maple tree is budding.
The bushes are waking up.
The grass is green again.

Even the tulips are pushing through.

Just leaves for now, but you can see where they’re going.
You can see the promise.

And that feels like something.

It feels like we might actually be getting close this time.

Especially when daylight stretches just a little longer, the sun lingering past 7pm, enough to make me think about the garden.

About tomatoes.

About what comes next.

🐾 Luna Rating™

🟡 Alert Level: Elevated
💤 Nap Quality: Interrupted (unacceptable)
🦴 Snacks Issued: Under review
👩‍⚕️ Medical Opinion: “Mumther needs to SIT DOWN and maybe cry a little, as a treat.”

🕯️ Before You Go

If something here hit close to home, you’re not alone.

If you stayed anyway, thank you.

You don’t have to earn your place here.

The café is always open. Even on the nights sleep doesn’t show up.

There’s always a seat for you here.

A Soft Check-In from the Lunatic Café

Take your meds if it’s time.
Drink some water.
Eat something small, even if it’s just a few bites.

No gold stars required.

Just a reminder from one haunted meat suit to another.

-Sky
© The Crippled Cryptid
Disability. Honesty. Survival without the performance.

🔗 https://linktr.ee/skylanarissa
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If you’d like to support the long, slow work of staying alive, stable, and mobile:
💜 https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-skys-journey-to-health-and-mobility