I’ve been looking after my niece again this evening. The initial plan was for her Nanna to have her overnight, but the little girl plays tricks on poor Mother when she stays over. For some reason, she always wakes in the early hours and asks Mum to go and sleep with her in the spare bed. This results in my mum being kicked by the wriggler and not getting any sleep.

Little Con’s latest thing is waking in the night with achy limbs, the dreaded growing pains. I remember how awful these can be from when my long bones were growing – they didn’t grow that much, admittedly, but still enough to cause night after night of the most horrible pain in my thighs, knees and hips.

I prepared badly for tonight: no Calpol. I’m sure she’d be fine with a cocodamol should the need arise. She did have a nice warm bath before bed though, so I’m hoping that might go some way to help.

Despite her constantly telling me that she doesn’t like spending time with me, she seemed to enjoy tonight. I’d bought her a new colouring book and a bribe Barbie comic in an attempt to get into her good books. Despite this, she stopped at one point, fell silent for a few seconds and said “I miss Tia”. Tia was her cat that had to be put down this week after a brain tumour or other such lesion manifested itself. It’s a hard thing to take for a little one and there’s that period of missing the animal and then worrying about forgetting them, especially when the only photo of the cat that her mum had was one that she’d taken on her mobile phone after it had been euthanised. The cat used to be sort of mine (another pet that my ex ex wanted before she wanted the dog) so I had some photos of her that I’d managed to take when she wasn’t skulking upstairs. In all honesty, it was the oddest cat I’ve ever come across and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a brain tumour growing from the time that we acquired it. But Little Con loved her and it’s a shame that one so young has to learn about death.

Death.

After my recent skirmish with death, my health situation still isn’t resolved. My current concern is whether this super high dose vitamin D therapy is going to cause a massive increase in my calcium levels that actually push me into a coma or cause me a cardiac arrest. I spent most of the day feeling utterly dreadful (dizziness, ataxia and other weirdness). This was despite falling asleep at 8pm, then going to bed at 10pm last night and oversleeping until 8.30 this morning.

What I also did last night was install an application on my phone called Sleeptalk, which is a noise-activated recording device that picks up and records all the sounds while you’re asleep. Intended as a bit of fun to see whether you talk in your sleep or to assess how bad your snoring is, I set it going then was in the land of nod by 10.30pm.

Listening to the playback this morning, it became apparent that I need to do something every night: remove the little dog’s collar. I’d forgotten to last night and there are about twenty or more recordings of him scratching or shaking and jangling his collar and nametags loudly. I didn’t stir on any of these occasions, but the noise must cause some disturbance in the pattern of my sleep.

I didn’t talk in my sleep, but there were a couple of moments where I could be heard turning over and “owing” at the pain in my back. And then there were the two occasions when I had to drink about a litre of fizzy water (then go for a pee) because I was so thirsty. My thirst got me worrying about side effects of hypercalcaemia then I let rationality back into my brain and blamed it on the huge anchovy pizza that I’d had for my tea.