(TW: spider image further down)

I’ve been sleeping exclusively on the sofa (settee/couch, whatever you call it) for around six months now. I hate it, my husband and I are traditional co-sleepers and neither of us want to sleep separately but until I can move to a bungalow this is how it’s just going to have to be.

It’s comfy enough and I am one of those lucky people who falls asleep easily regardless of where I am. My mum always said I could “sleep on a washing line” and that is probably true! So I’ll set the scene for you, I generally sleep propped up because laying down comes with its own problems due to the shitness of my legs but anyway… so I wedge myself into the “corner” of the sofa, arm on one side, sofa back on the other, lift my feet up onto the footstool (to hopefully aid in draining some of the fluid that accumulates in my feet throughout the day) blanket, cushion for a pillow, sleep. Done. Thats the easy part. If you’ve read some of my previous entries you’ll know that the morning is where the problems are. I do NOT wake up in that position 🙄 what happens in the night is anyone’s guess, I’ve always been one of those people that goes to sleep and wakes up the exact same way, duvet hasn’t moved – I haven’t moved. I think the extensor spasms that blight my life creep in overnight as my many drugs wear off and the result is I slide down. When I wake up I have slid forward, my legs locked in as straight a position as you can imagine – like when you tiptoe to reach something high up. My knickers and pyjama bottoms are so far up my arse I can almost taste them and where my head is now against the back of the sofa all of my chins are firmly resting on my chest. This is every day. Every. Fucking. Day.

My legs are no longer functional so getting out of this is a fun game that affords me a workout every morning. Yay. So I have to slide one foot off the footstool, which invariably hits the floor with a mildly painful thud, then follow with the other, with a similar result. then shimmy forward so my bum slides over the edge of the sofa and gravity forces my body to bend at the waist and end up sitting in a slightly reclined position on the floor. You see, my legs aren’t the only muscle groups to be the victims of the dreaded extensor spasm, my abdominal muscles join the party too, so sitting or bending forward is a big fat “no” regardless of what I do. Hence I have to employ gravity to help me. Once on the floor I take more muscle relaxing drugs and try to relax for 15 minutes until my muscles become (slightly) less rigid and I am able to manipulate my body into a more amenable position.

This is invariably when THEY show up. We’ve had a lot of rain the UK. A lot. And when it rains house spiders venture into peoples houses to stay dry. And when I am sat on the floor, in varying degrees of darkness, no glasses on (because I’ve been asleep) without doubt one of those buggers will show up next to me having emerged from under the sofa. I’m NOT a fan. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a squealer or anything innately girly like that, but I definitely don’t want one of those 8-legged fuckers getting on me! So my latest strategy is to bang on the carpet near it and frighten it away! Panic is not something that serves me well so I just scare it off and hope my husband can find it later and evict it.

We are lucky in the UK that none of our spiders are deadly. Sure if it’s a big enough bugger it can deliver a painful bite but you sure-as-shit won’t die, so that’s something. But they move FAST, easily disappearing from view like the sharks in JAWS disappearing under the water… you never know where it’s gone, where it might reappear… it might be ON me 😱 and I can’t move yet to get it off… you get the idea.

Back to my predicament. Drugs on board, 8-legged freak scared away I still have to get back up onto the sofa. Which, believe it or not, is the easy(ish) part. I get up into a kneeling position, at which point I can (with great relief) dig my underwear out of my backside, pull my right leg up into a bent position in front of me with my hands and then one hand on the sofa, the other on bent knee, push up and flop back down onto the seat. Shimmy back and TA-DAH you’d never know it had happened. Of course, it doesn’t always go that swimmingly, on occasion gravity lets me down and I end up flat on the floor, flailing around like a fish out of water. Thats a whole different set of actions that need to be performed in specific order but the main thing is keeping the spiders away from me especially when in such a vulnerable position!

Please don’t think my house is like fucking Arachnophobia, the film, it’s not at all, I just only ever see the little bastards when I’m on the floor WITH them, and that is way too close for my liking!