Sleep and Ass Kicking

Hello all!

I don't have a fabulous picture or collage this time, because my creative juices have not been flowing. If you are dead set on eye candy, visit "The Number Garden" on Tumblr for edgy, off the wall pics. I'm sure one of them might convey the way I'm feeling right now.

My pshrink has reduced my secondary anti-psychotic in hopes that I will achieve more REM sleep, but that has left me hazy and In My Head most of the time. Some days it just feels like there's no fixing this thing upstairs that rattles my days and makes my nights horrifying.

I did find a sleeping pill that actually helps me sleep almost uninterrupted through the night, but it wasn't on the insurance formulary, and so I had to wait for a prior authorization from the doc and the insurance. After 2 weeks of no sleep (except for every 3rd day because I was so exhausted, and then only for a few hours), my insurance finally pushed the medicine through ... and VOILA! sleep!

The only problem is that I like to watch things like The Walking Dead or a Joss Whedon movie during the day. Now every time I close my eyes ... zombies! And they're eating me alive and then I die and it blacks out and starts over again. Unfortunately, this usually happens when there's no one else in the house to comfort me, so I'm getting my ass kicked by dead things and things that want me dead every waking moment. Sleep is the blissful interlude, but I find it is hard to wake and that the pill has me sleeping around 12 hours a night.

Off I go into the spiral of delusions and paranoia about death. My therapist doesn't want to talk about this, and tells me denial is how most people get through their days. I argued that denial keeps me dissociative and numb to the moment and the world around me. So I have been isolating myself to the nth degree, avoiding situations which cause me stress and discomfort. Since I have school during the week, this is proving difficult. I have a research paper due at the end of November. Just the thought of it stresses me out. Where to go from here?

Perchance to Dream ...?

And The Worms Will Eat Me Up, pencil by ME, 2005

My sleep's been all wonky lately.

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.