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| And The Worms Will Eat Me Up, pencil by ME, 2005 |
Not only does it take me close to 2 hours to fall asleep on a normal night, my sleep is very fragmented. I wake to tactile hallucinations, the People In My Head poking and prodding in very uncomfortable places. Or audio hallucinations will wake me suddenly. The other night I heard a voice in my ear telling me to make sure not to paint my house avocado green. It startled me from my sleep. So my pshrink ordered a sleep study.
The techs at the sleep center were nervous and new. I clenched my teeth as it took the New Guy over an hour to hook me up to the equipment that would measure my sleep. I kept in mind this would reveal all the problems I have while sleeping and tried to grin and bear it. I had to wait a week for the results.
I went in with the assumption there was something terribly wrong with me that could be easily fixed. I was wrong. My page-sized chart of sleep was punctuated by 3 small dots of actual REM sleep. The rest of the page showed the zig zag marks of me hopping in and out of sleep. The stats said I wake up on average 10.6 times PER HOUR I sleep. When I asked why, the sleep doctor admitted he just didn't know.
"I can tell you what it's NOT," he assured me. "It's not sleep apnea; it's not restless leg syndrome; you're not having any seizures. As to what is waking you up, " he continued, "we don't know. It was not a full EEG, so we are just as stumped as you are." He folded his hands in front of him in a very doctor-like way and told me to try "sleep restriction" to see if that helped. That means he wanted me to limit myself to about 5 or 6 hours in bed, to see if I would sleep through it out of pure exhaustion. I pointed out that I'm already exhausted when I go to bed, and that I have school during the day. "Good points," he said and left the room.
My pshrink was alarmed when he saw the results. He said he wanted to try a med for narcolepsy on me, one that requires you to be on a national register to take. Red flags popped up in my head. I Googled the medicine (named Xyrem), and found it is government controlled GHB. The side effects were alarming. Sleep eating, bed wetting, psychosis and memory loss just a few of them. It also said not to ever take it if you are on ANY meds for mental illness. No thank you, No thank you, No thank you played through my head. I crossed my mental fingers that the doctor could not prescribe it to me based on interactions with my psych meds.
And it turns out he couldn't. Phew!
So he tried another sleep medication, which kept me awake all night with respiratory depression. I laid awake, afraid to sleep for fear that I would stop breathing entirely. My breath came shallow and difficult. So the next night, I halved it. I woke less disturbed in the night, but am still exhausted all day. I still wake up to the feeling of hands where they shouldn't be, though no one is there. And I still must deal with school, despite my fatigue. But no respiratory distress last night, and I hope after a week of it I can begin to sleep normally.
I wish this could've been a post of hope and perseverance. It's not. I just can't sleep well, and no one knows why. In its unsatisfactory way - like most true stories - there is no resolution ready on the page.
