5 posts tagged “insomnia”
It's 2am and I am not remotely ready to go to bed. I worked a full day today -- I even got a lot done: I completed the budget, which involved some serious analysis; I wrote the first four pages of the new staff guide; I went to a pointless meeting -- see, I did a lot. And I walked to and from work, so, in theory, I should be a little sleepy, right? I even stayed out last night, drinking wine. Yet here I am, avoiding my bedroom with every fiber of my being.
The night before last the dread kept me up until 5:30 in the morning. I forced myself to sleep on the couch for a couple of hours, just so that I could get an eensy bit of rest, and I did feel pretty good yesterday. But this is cannot go on long-term.
I think I know where the dread comes from. I miss someone. I can go all day without thinking about him, but then when I turn off the lamp on the nightstand and settle my head on my pillow, there he is. I keep replaying every moment that we were together and every word of our last conversation. It happens without fail every night, so much so that I can't bear to be in my bedroom...I can't think about it anymore. It preoccupies me and keeps me up, which is funny because here I am staying awake so that I won't have to be kept awake by my thoughts about Wes.
Every day when I come home from work I find a distraction, so that I won't have to think about eventually going to bed. I'll sit and write about inane things, like sweetsops and guineps, or I'll pace around the apartment, or watch a season of Queer as Folk, or read any number of books and magazines sitting around here, or watch CNN, or just stare.
I work too much at this point to think about having a life outside of work, to distract me in a socially acceptable way. Plus, I'm just not feeling good enough about myself to go meet new people. It's weird -- most of the people here came here for the lifestyle, not work, but I came here for work. I feel like I'm missing out, but, hey, at least I can finally pay my bills.
My bed is still made from yesterday. I think it might stay that way again tonight.
My doctor called yesterday with the results from my exciting night at the sleep clinic, and, man, did he have some disturbing/not-at-all surprising news for me. According to my data, I have "severe" sleep problems, to which I say, "DUH." I don't have sleep apnea, which I figured, since I don't snore, making me an excellent travel companion; remember that should you plan any trips to Belize or Honduras in the near future. Anyway, my doctor threw so many numbers my way and I couldn't write them down fast enough; I did, though, manage to retain a couple fun facts:
- My sleep is highly fragmented. I averaged 19 arousals per hour, with 241 total brief arousals.
- I woke up several other times, too -- about 300 times in all over the course of the night.
- It took me 119 minutes to fall into REM sleep; 61:40 is the normal amount of time to get to this stage of sleep.
- I spent about 13 minutes in REM sleep. The norrmal time for adults is 90 to 120 minutes.
After quickly sharing my data, my doctor concluded, "Well, it's no wonder that you feel tired all the time -- you're not sleeping!"
Shit. You don't say.
Doctor Obvious said I need to go in for a follow-up with the sleep doctor; the earliest I can get in is three days before I move back to Florida, in mid-October. The cause of my insomnia could be the particular prescription drug(s) I'm taking or possibly my depression. Hmm, that's just great...I can't sleep because I'm depressed, and yet, I'm depressed because I can't sleep.
I'm trying to get my antidepressants changed (I'm taking 20mg of Lexapro daily); my best friend, my therapist, and now my PCP have suggested a change and I'm starting to think they're right. I'm not really feeling "better" after taking it for six weeks -- if anything, I'm just really numb. The other night, Barbara Walters had a tear-jerker interview with Terri Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter's widow. I couldn't cry. Keep in mind that, previously, I have cried during the Olympics, basketball games, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and countless other really pathetic things. After a really fun sushi dinner with friends the other night, the first thing I thought when we parted ways was, "God, it was nice to feel something." It was brief and I've been so deflated lately -- I'd like to figure out how to hang on to that non-deflated (I guess that would be inflated) feeling.
What's the last thing you usually do or think about before you fall asleep?
Har, har, har, Vox -- you should know that I don't sleep. Geez, if you cared, Vox, you would have read my previous posts. Gah.
I had my adventure in sleep medicine last night and what did I find out? Not a thing. Well, at least not yet. I really hope they discovered something -- apnea, narcolepsy, I don't really care -- because I don't want the elaborate process of attaching 20 some electrodes to my head, neck, and legs to be all for naught. I had to sleep with a tube in my nose last night, man, and it left a deep imprint on the left side of my face -- I really don't want to have done that for nothing. Plus, I'm not sleeping and I would like to know why.
The whole experience was pretty surreal, actually. The last thing I expected to do last night was get into a conversation about Courtney Ellis with a sleep tech who had that permanent makeup stuff (tattooed eyeliner!). You see, Courtney Ellis lived across the street from me in 4th and 5th grade when I lived in northern Illinois; strangely, the electrode tech lived in this same town at the same time and is the same age as me, so she went to high school with all of my little friends from when I was ten. Isn't that a little odd? I mean, we both live in freaking Montana now, and no one lives in Montana (it is quite a sparsely populated state). I didn't expect my electrode-putter-on-er to be a friend of my childhood friends from a town 1600 miles from here. Bizarre.
Other than that small-worldiness, my visit was pretty unremarkable. The sleep techs monitored me with a video camera and had a two-way voice-activated intercom. So, when I needed to pee in the middle of the night, all I had to do was say out loud from my bed, "Is anyone there? I need to go to the bathroom." Then, immediately, someone was in my room, helping me and my head full of wires out of bed (I looked a little John Travolta-in-Battlefield Earth-esque, minus the gratuitous crotch bulge).
Yeah, that's so not hot.
Now, I wait and hope to hear that my insomnia can be cured. That would be much more preferable than finding out that it's just a result of depression and anxiety. Here's the thing about anxiety and insomnia: when I'm anxious, I can't sleep, but since I'm so tired all the time, I can't get out of this depression or over my anxiety. It's cyclical like that.
Foxy (my cute dog) isn't a fan of my insomnia. She sleeps in my bed (yes, I'm single and I realize that sharing a bed with my dog will probably keep me that way for some time; I'm okay with that). Every once in awhile when I'm tossing and turning, I catch her looking over her shoulder at me with this expression of, "For real, just calm the f*ck down and go to sleep already." Yeah, she can be kinda bitchy when she wants to sleep.
So can I. At least I don't have a gratuitous crotch bulge to deal with. I like to sleep on my stomach and I think that having extra materials in that area might impede that.
In keeping with my favorite hobbies (see right), I'm spending the night at Missoula Sleep Medicine; I just can't enough of going to doctors, you know. Actually, I've actively avoided doctors for quite some time. For example, when I broke my foot last October, it took my parents harassing me by phone for two hours -- my mom was even on vacation at the time -- before I finally sucked it up and went to the hospital. Now, though, I'm in this situation where my insurance just kicked in last month and I'm leaving my job in six weeks: I've got to make the most of my insurance before it disappears. Plus, I actually have real health problems that are affecting my quality of life.
One of those problems is insomnia, which, as we know from Lunesta commercials, affects something like 30 million Americans. I've never known my mother and my grandmother to sleep and NOT sleep is something I don't want to do for the next 50+ years of my life. Right now I'm taking Temazepam to knock me out, but it's not helping, even when I double my dosage. So, tonight I'm going to the sleep clinic where they will monitor me as I sleep (or toss and turn for hours like I do every night). The receptionist told me to wear what I normally wear to bed, but to avoid "silky things" and to "try to stick with cotton." That makes me wonder just what people have been wearing when they've wandered into the lab... skimpy negligees? Satin boxers? Nothing at all?
I don't intend for this blog to be solely about my insomnia, anxiety, or other medical issues; I used to be somewhat fun -- see my other blogs! I used to write about butterflies! But I haven't been in a happy place for a few months now; I am working really hard to dig out and get back to that happy place (my happy place has lots of sun, sand, saltwater, and chocolate soy milk. What does yours have?). It's hard, though, to feel better when I'm not sleeping, and, hence, I'm allowing strangers to tape electrodes on my head tonight. Good times.
