Those of you who know me know I’m a bit of a holistic chick: salmon instead of red meat, magnesium oil instead of opioids, and water instead of fizzy drinks (not counting beer – I’m not a complete idiot).

Which means that when I don’t sleep well, in order not to be completely hypocritical, instead of knocking back enough coffee in the morning to send my heart beat into a rhythm only the late Keith Moon could have reproduced, I’ve turned to another source I’ve recently read about with slight reluctance.

Apples.

I found this information on the Livestrong site: “If you wake up hungry and only drink coffee, you can quickly run low on blood sugar…Fructose, the other half, takes longer to digest, so an apple provides stable energy for a longer period than a cup of coffee with sugar. Digestible fiber in the apple extends the energy supply and makes your stomach feel full.”

The problem with this approach is that I’m so sleep deprived when I stumble out the door at 6 a.m. towards the barn that, with apple in hand, I can’t find my mouth to actually eat it.

There’s another problem as well. Like those of you who will testify that you have to hide in a closet to remove the plastic film from a slice of cheese because your dog will hear you, I can’t be munching an apple in front of 1,200 pound horses as I slouch into the barn and think I can get any work done without being shoved across a stall and knocked over like the kid whose milk money is stolen by the school bully.

I counted: it’s 58 steps from my house to the barn, so if I ate really fast, that seemed a reasonable approach. And since I’ve been reading this incredibly addictive murder mystery (no, I’m not going to tell you— read my book first, and then I’ll tell you; I’ve got vet bills to pay), I’ve creeped myself out so badly that when I finally turn out the light at 1 a.m., I have to get up twice to make sure all the doors are locked and alarm set, resulting in about three hours of sleep a night.

With hours of work before me in this stupefied state (the same stupefied state that made me think this was a good idea), it also seemed reasonable that if I ate two or three apples in rapid succession on that 58-step journey to the barn, by the time I got behind the wheelbarrow, I’d be bright eyed and bushy tailed.

I’ll never actually know because half way through the third apple, swallowing great mouthfuls of barely chewed chunks, I keeled over, holding my stomach with both hands as does a woman who is two weeks late of her expected delivery date and moaned with every remaining step.

“I’m gonna die,” I groaned to Forrest, the horse I like to think of as my soulmate, who could have cared less and began to paw for his morning feed.

I could see my stomach visibly expanding beneath my T-shirt, surely about to burst with a force unseen since the tech bubble of 2000. And then that whole fiber thing kicked in. I won’t say that I felt particularly bushy tailed as I flew back down the path towards the house and, ahem, water closet, but I will tell you my eyes were wide open.

As I hoped was the door.