Postop: Sleep

Most of us get the message that rest is pretty important to our recovery. It can be frustrating, then, to find that sleep is ridiculously elusive in that first postop month or so.

There are a lot of factors that are working to keep us from falling and staying asleep. It takes weeks to get all of the drugs from surgery out of our systems. It's common during the time we're clearing the remains of anesthesia to have vivid dreams, nightmares and disturbed sleep from these drugs' effects on our brains. There's nothing to do about this, really, other than wait out our own body's ability to get rid of the last lingering traces.

Stress is an important part of this too. Stress disorders many of our daily hormone cycles and can have destabilizing effects on our brain chemistry. Normally we rely on our circadian rhythms to guide us through our sleep and wake periods, and when they are upset, so is sleep. As we get further from surgery and relax into our healing, chemicals in our brains normalize and our bodies return to a more normal daily cycle. Unfortunately, fretting about sleep only adds to our stress and prolongs the process of readjustment.

Speaking of hormones, our ovarian hormones play a significant role in sleep. Not only do daily cycles of estrogen affect the other daily ups and downs of the hormones that guide our sleep, but estrogen itself can act on our brains to make sleep difficult. Too little estrogen often makes it hard to stay asleep, and a woman with low levels may find herself waking frequently during the night. Too much estrogen, on the other hand, tends to have a stimulating effect somewhat like caffeine, and we feel the same thing as if we'd had a double-extra just before bedtime: spinning wheels may make it hard to fall asleep, even though once we get there, we tend to stay asleep most of the night.

And don't neglect the hormone link if you kept your ovaries. They may be undergoing a period of diminished output due to the local trauma of surgery, effectively putting you into a temporary state of menopause. Whether or not they recover, the disruptions can make sleep difficult to maintain.

Then too, the very nature of our recovery also influences our sleep patterns. In the hospital, we are (of good necessity) awakened frequently and spend a lot of time in a drowsing state. By the time we get home, we're more active but still may spend a lot of the first week more in bed than out of it. This trains our bodies away from a day/night cycle of long awake periods and long sleep periods. Since we are so inactive, we have less of a need for sleep. By fulfilling our sleep needs in short incremental naps through the day, we may arrive at a nominal bedtime only to find that we really don't need to sleep. This training effect can take weeks to undue.

It's hard to get comfortable when you've just had abdominal surgery. Whether or not you have an abdominal incision, you may have a lot of difficulty getting comfortably situated in bed. It's also hard to move around and reposition yourself, so that rolling over to a new position, something that would normally cause no waking at all, now brings you to full consciousness as you laboriously untangle from pillows and covers to slowly seek another position. If you've been doing a good job drinking enough during the day and/or you're still experiencing bladder crankiness, you'll probably be waking up more to go to the bathroom, too. And because it's more of an effort to get up and get to the bathroom and then settled back down again, that's going to wake you more thoroughly than it would have pre-op and so it'll take longer to get back to sleep.

That's a lot of things working against good, lasting sleep at night. And while it's all fine to know what the cause of this might be, more pressing at 2 am in a bout of the floppy-wakefuls is what to do about it.

1. Pain meds: Narcotic pain meds may seem like a good thing to take at bedtime to force us to relax and sleep. But they generally last only 4-6 hours, leaving you wakeful and sore before the time when you may think you're ready to get up for another day. A more durable approach to pain is the oral anti-imflammatory that has a 12-hour life, like naprosyn. Taking that before bedtime gives you plenty of medication life to let you rest comfortably through till the morning, without the wakeful effects of having it wear off. Be sure to check with your doctor, though, if you're unsure whether you can or should be using a drug from the NSAID family. After the first few postop days, using the narcotics when you're about to be especially active (and increase your discomfort) makes more sense than using them when you are in bed.
2. Napping: It's important to get enough rest, yes, but that doesn't need to mean napping every hour through the day. During the first few weeks postop, we should be working towards more and more time awake during the day. Pacing our activities so that we spend some time exercising and then some time in sedentary, undemanding activity before getting up again is a good healing pattern. Getting exercise and then sleeping and then getting up for another hour is training our bodies away from a sleep-at-night pattern.
3. Exercise: We do need to engage in enough activity throughout the day to need to sleep at night. Every day we need to walk a little further or on a little steeper terrain or make another cautious trip up and down stairs or something that challenges our bodies to grow stronger and helps cut down the incidence of postop constipation and complications. Every activity needs rest and no activity should leave you still tired after resting, but it's important to keep challenging yourself. It's better to repeatedly engage in small activities than go for one gut-burning grind a day, too. By making ourselves healthily tired, we're readier for sleep at night. If there's no reason to sleep, we won't.
4. Preparation: We can clue our bodies when we are expecting sleep and ease the process of falling asleep. Before we had surgery, we most likely did this by our normal evening routines. Surgery disrupts this, so we need to consciously re-establish sleep-promoting practices. Changing into sleepwear (wear sweats or a caftan or something else comfy for lounging during the daytime), going through teeth and skin care routines, reading in bed--these are some of the things we often do normally that we let slide postop. We can also signal our bodies to relax by having a warm drink of something soothing. Sleepy tea blends (no caffeine!) or warm milk or products like ovaltine all contain mildly sedating agents that can help us through those first few moments of falling asleep. Positive imaging and relaxation routines can make sure we're not fighting ourselves, letting our worry over falling asleep work against us by keeping us alert.
5. Patience: It's also important not to try to force ourselves to sleep just because the clock says it's time. When we're not sleepy, lying in bed fretting only makes us more wakeful. When we wake up during the night, tossing and fuming prolongs the time it takes to return to sleep. If you're not so sleepy your eyes would prefer to be closed, you may not need to be asleep. Give yourself an honest time, and then get up or do something else. Maybe you just need to turn on the light and read; maybe you need to get up and go for a pee and a drink; maybe you should get up and watch a movie from a nice recliner where it won't matter if you finally doze off. Even if all you do is get up, read half a chapter and then go to bed to fall asleep, you won't feel as though you've had nearly the struggle for sleep as if you'd instead flopped around in bed fussing for that amount of time. The idea is to set yourself up to be relaxed about sleeping so you quit being your own worst enemy.
6. Sleeping pills?: Forcing yourself to sleep because you think you should when your body isn't wanting to is not really helping to re-establish your own innate sleep patterns. If our sleep is so disordered that we truly are going days and days without any sleep (not just keeping ourself from needing to sleep by cat-napping five minutes at a time all through the day), then there is something more going on that we need to talk with our doctor about. It's always better to deal with the underlying problem than to put a drug bandaid on top. If your doctor finds that there is no physical problem or hormonal imbalance interfering with your sleep and feels you need medication to break your present, dysfunctional sleep cycle, then short term use of drugs may be warranted. But do your health a favor: don't just make reaching for a bigger hammer to knock yourself out your first response to the problem.

These all sound like pretty simplistic things, but none of them really offers a "quick fix." I know very well that we often prefer the easy solution of a prescription to solve anything we perceive as a problem. But the sources of postop insomnia aren't going to go away quickly or be cured by one simple thing. We need to give ourselves time to regain our normal patterns and to clear the effects of surgery from our systems. Postop insomnia is generally something that requires healing, not treatment.

It's easy to believe that we need to heal our surgical incisions because of the discomfort they cause us. It's harder to see the need to heal other systems in our bodies when we can't see those "cuts" in our normal function. But postop insomnia is another signal that our bodies haven't gotten over surgery yet and need our active support. Part of a good recovery is rebuilding ourselves to take care of all our needs.