To read about the beginning of my insomnia, go here.

To say that I was skeptical of my diagnosis would be an understatement.  I didn’t buy it at all.  I had tried to talk to my doctor and explain to her that I wasn’t upset by my parents’ divorce.  I won’t go into the details, but I will say that if anything, I felt relieved.  I’m Catholic, and I don’t exactly buy the idea of divorce (I’m a “one and done” kind of gal)–I never have–so to say that I was relieved and even rather pleased with my parents divorce should give you some indication.  I tried to explain this to my doctor, to explain to her that, if anything, I was feeling less stressed than I normally did.  Sure, I felt guilt over not feeling upset over the situation, but that didn’t change how I regarded it.  My explications, however, fell on deaf ears.  If anything, it caused more worry, because I wasn’t handling the situation normally–I wasn’t showing the appropriate affect because I was repressing it and refusing to deal with it.

I ended up taking the medication for about two months, and then I realized that I didn’t want to take it, I didn’t need to take it and it wasn’t doing anything helpful in the first place.  While I didn’t experience another five-day zombie stint again (still haven’t, praise God), my body didn’t go back to normal.  And this was before I went to the doctor.  I kept having problems, and they kept getting worse, but more chronic and persistent.  The anti-depressant that I had been put on didn’t really help matters, and since I felt that I was on it under false pretenses anyway, I saw no need to continue taking it.  So, I didn’t.

Now, I said that I have never gone five days without sleeping since this all started, and that is true.  However, it’s not unusual for me to go 24 to 72 hours without sleeping.  The 72-hour stints are admittedly more rare, but 24 hours?  Fairly normal occurrence every couple of weeks.  I average (note: I said average) between three to five hours of sleep a night on a normal week.  That isn’t too bad in general until you consider how long this is going on.  It’s to the point that even if I do get a normal amount of sleep at night (which is known to happen a couple times a month, but I usually have to take something for that to happen, and I only really sleep through the night without waking up maybe once a month), it’s usually a curse rather than a blessing.  Every time I get sleep, my body just sucks it up to the point that I’m just completely drained when I wake up.  It’s sort of like a sleep hangover.  Once my body gets some, it needs more, more, more.  That’d be great if I didn’t have responsibilities, because then I could sleep the whole day away.  But I do have responsibilities, and I can’t afford to do that.

I think I said in the post yesterday that hallucinations usually come around the seventy or seventy-two hour mark.  I know I mentioned how horrendously awful they are, so I try to avoid them.  Over the years, I’ve tried pretty much everything.  I’ve done a lot of reading on sleep disorders over the years, and what I’ve learned enough about it through my own research and experience is enough to scare any sane individual.  However, I’m not going to go into that; just let it suffice that there’s a lot that you don’t know (or want to know) or realize about sleep deprivation.

I’ve obviously not been able to fix things, but I have figured a number of things out over the years.  I control my insomnia to the extent that I’ve found that I can, and as bad as it can sometimes be now, if I didn’t do anything at all, it would be a lot worse.  Largely, I’ve managed to at least prevent it so that I rarely ever get to the point of experiencing hallucinations.  Sometimes, that’s the best victory I can hope for.

In the process, though, I’ve found that I tend to be the exception rather than the rule.  This is annoying.  For instance, one of the cardinal rules of insomnia is Do Not Nap–Not Now, Not Ever.  I am a champion napper.  I used to chart my sleep habits along with a couple of other factors I thought might affect my sleep, and I discovered that I get more sleep on the whole if I nap.  Not napping does not yield me any more sleep at night.  It will make me more exhausted, and I’ll fall asleep faster, but I’ll sleep less.  The other night when I said I was going to go to bed at 9:30?  My eyelids were practically closing on their own, and I was in bed by 9:45.  I woke up at 12:13, and I couldn’t get back to sleep again until about 6:30 in the morning.  I also have found that I tend to sleep better during the day than at night, and I think this has something to do with my nightmares and my anxiety, because I think I subconsciously feel safer from them during the day.  Maybe I just feel physically safer, I don’t know.  (Though, I feel a weird kinship with the night.)

I sleep less during the day, but I sleep more soundly.  I think I flail around in my sleep less, because I can get four or five hours of sleep during the day and feel largely the same as if I got eight or nine hours of sleep at night.  (I should probably note that even when I do sleep, I do not sleep well.  Nightmares and the flailing and such.)

Similarly, coffee.  One of the first things you’re told to do when you start having sleep problems is to eliminate caffeine from your diet.  I know you will probably read this with more than a little bit of skepticism, but caffeine actually helps me sleep as long as I cut off by 4 or 5, 6 at the absolute latest.  Since I have years of sleep deprivation stored up, I require caffeine to function, and since I have no real energy of my own, I depend upon coffee to provide me with it.  So, I will burn through that, and then once it’s done, rather than being on empty, I’m sort of…less than empty, if that makes sense.  It helps me burn through my reserves so that my body is less capable of fighting sleep.  I’m guessing on that, I don’t really know, but what I do know is that I actually get more sleep on average when I consume coffee.  My amount and quality of sleep really stinks on days that I don’t have caffeine.  Also, when you’re sleep-deprived, you tend to be more of a grump.  Don’t try to deny it, because I’m sure you know firsthand the veracity of that statement.  Now, try to imagine chronic and extensive sleep deprivation.  FOR YEARS.  That caffeine is downright necessary in the prevention of mass murder.

To be continued… when I figure out where I’m going with this…