So I after my largely sleepless night I went to work. Walking down the hill to the bus wasn’t bad, in fact it felt good to be out in the incredibly warm (for January) air. I could feel the tiredness buzzing in my head but I thought tea or coffee (or both) would help that. I vowed to take a pill if I had any problem sleeping that night.

I got through most of the day more or less without incident and if I’d stopped at the soup for lunch I would have probably been OK. But I didn’t. I ordered an egg salad sandwich as well, with lots of vegetables. I ate the soup and then half the sandwich and within minutes the abdominal pain started. Exhaustion proves to be some sort of vulnerability amplifier. The pain was mild, so I went back to work and threw away the other half of the sandwich. The pain grew a little as I worked, but I thought it might settle with nothing else added to my system.

Between the tiredness and the pain, I did not stay late. The minute my time was up I shuffled out to the train. The walk home was nothing like the walk down the hill in the morning. The weather was still lovely, a few spitting rain drops, the smell of damp earth — the world was fine, but every step increased the pain.

When I got home I went straight to bed and struggled with sleep, exhaustion, pain and nausea. By evening, with the aid of a sleeping pill and antinauseant, sleep managed to win the battle.

It’s 09:30 the next morning, and the pain is largely gone. Still, no food yet; I think I’ll try soup later, if the pain stays away. Definitely no sandwiches, nothing solid, nothing with fiber.

Exhaustion is such a powerful thing and sleep it’s only antidote, so if it doesn’t come, all is screwed.

So yesterday’s cartoons were partly correct. I did feel like a frazzled cat by the end of business, but the works below by Zhiwan Cheung are a bit more accurate. The first: how I felt by yesterday evening before sleep finally bore me down.

At the moment I feel more like this:

It’ll be interesting to see what happens by the end of the day. The thing about moving through extremes of delight and exhaustion is that life is certainly interesting.