Sleep Test From Hell

I’ve been away for a while, haven’t I? For the past 3+ months I’ve had some real problems sleeping. Both falling asleep and staying asleep. I have been really dragging. No desire to do anything. If I wasn't hilariously happy, I would say I was depressed, but to tell the truth, my personal life has been amazing lately and it's only going to get better with the twins returning home for good from their Marine enlistments later this month. Life is great!

About two weeks ago, I decided to self-medicate with OTC sleeping pills and I tried "Simply Sleep" by the makers of Tylenol. I know it's just a glorified version of Benadryl, my best friend is a pharmacist. But I had to try something. It worked the first two days, but on the third day it gave me a headache that lasted after I had awakened the following day. It had to go. Still, I did manage to consistently sleep 6 hours a night. The following week, I decided to self-medicate with my good buddy Guiness. I knew I would be seeing my doctor that Thursday, after I had a crown put in at my dentist, so it was just going to be a few days. Guiness worked really well and, again, I managed to sleep about 6 hours a night.

This past Thursday, my doctor sent me off for another sleep test to find out why I was having problems with the staying asleep part. For the falling asleep part, he prescribed Ambien CR, which I have yet to fill and don’t know if I will or not yet. If I do, it won’t be until the weekend, when it’s not going to matter if I am groggy afterwards or whether I oversleep. If I’m going to feel like crap, it’s not going to be at work. I can handle the low energy/motivation and tiredness. I don’t want to “work under the influence”.

So, on the sleep test from hell part: they decided to put me on a machine, for whatever reason, and it may be a valid one (I’m waiting to hear). This left my nose and throat painfully dry, not just at 2:30 in the morning when I woke up from the discomfort, nor just immediately after I woke up a few hours later, but I was miserable all day long. I thought my nose recovered by noon, but when I was trying to fall asleep, I noticed I was still sore from the night before. I don’t know how much water I drank that day trying to re-hydrate my throat. It was beyond just throwing water on it, it was rather raw.

To add insult to injury, I started getting sleepy around 5pm on Saturday. Nevertheless, I was not able to fall asleep until 3:30am. This is the worse part of my problem, that even though I get sleepy, once I am in bed, I cannot fall asleep. I've tried relaxation music, special "delta wave" sleep recordings through my iPod, changing all the lightbulbs in my house to a lower wattage, warm baths, etc etc. Nothing seems to work. Except Simply Sleep, which gives me headaches, and good ol' Mr. Guiness. If I didn't get sleepy at all, I wouldn't care, I'd just find something to do and accomplish a lot. I've always felt that sleeping is such a waste of perfectly productive time.

I have been working on my Rainbow Borders piece. I am about halfway through the fifth row. Will take a picture tonight and post tomorrow morning.

Also this past week, I picked up Wayne Dyer's new book. If you're into that kind of thing, I highly recommend you watch/TiVo his PBS special.