Hypochondria
Mar. 1st, 2008 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
perzephone
I'm starting to think I've got a problem I don't even believe in. I'm starting to honestly think I have this mysterious malaise known as 'chronic fatigue syndrome'. Not that there's anything anyone can do about it - there's no cure only treatments for the various symptoms. But I do have all the symptoms and none of the other problems/diseases/syndromes (Eppstein Barr, wacky chromosomes, rheumatism, Sjogren's, chronic leukemia, etc & so forth) that match all the CFS symptoms. I'd be more open to the idea if there was a pill that would make it all go away but it's one of those auto-immune diseases that have no cure and won't get me FMLA. A more insidious thought has been creeping around my brain... what if it's fatal familial insomnia? It might a prion disease, like CJD or BSE - it could just be genetic. A lot of my relatives have/had trouble sleeping, a lot of them went nuts... what if I'm not seeing ghosts or entities? What if I'm hallucinating? What if my thalamus is slowly rotting away, eating my sanity and sleep as it dissolves into goo? I'd like to ask the doctor to test me for it, but I'm too embarrassed, because I'm a self-diagnosing internet surfer.
Taking 2 Elavil (which equals 50mg) brought the sweaty-panicky-frequent waking down from 4 times a night to just once last night and the night before. However, even though I don't get any other side effects from regular daily doses of Elavil, taking 50mg makes it really hard to wake up and get going in the morning. I got up at 10am but I didn't wake up til around, oh, 3 or 4 this afternoon. And it makes me stumble around like a drunken monkey when the alarm goes off. When my alarm went off yesterday morning, I flew out of bed like normal & discovered my legs weren't fully cooperating with the rest of my body, so I did a nifty knee-and-ankle wrenching dance until I decided to just sit back down on the bed for a minute or two. Then when I tried to get back up & turn my alarm off, it took my hand about 4 more minutes to remember how to turn the alarm off. I succeeded in changing the radio station, the volume and the dimmer on the LED time display. This morning I thankfully woke up before the alarm went off :P I took it somewhat slower getting out of bed - just sort of sat up & worked my way onto my feet. I can't keep taking 50mg because of the whole tolerance issue. I want the Elavil to keep working for awhile longer before I am forced to up the dose.
The only reason I woke up before my alarm went off was because I was having a creepy spider dream. We're talking hordes of spiders. Ugheek.
Insomnia is the worst thing. It'd be different if I was one of those lucky people who only need 4 hours of sleep, but I feel like absolute crap if I don't get about 8 - 10. I'm exhausted, but not sleepy. My knees and hips ache, my lower back aches, but if I try to lay down I just lay there, waiting for time to pass. It's not like my mind is racing or anything. I'm just laying there, wide awake and wanting death to come quickly. I have excellent sleep hygiene, too. Only use my bed for sleeping and sex, I only go to bed when I'm sleepy, I don't lay in bed & do my taxes or anything, there's no arguing or television in my room, I keep the temperature low but not too low, I avoid caffeine after a certain time, I don't go to bed angry or hungry, I sleep in the dark (now that I can sleep when it's dark - sometimes I still have to use a nightlight)... it's always quiet in the house & if I play music it's somnorific, not like Rob Zombie or NIN or anything raucus. I do everything right when it comes to my bed, my bedroom and preparing for sleep... so why can't I sleep? What triggers my wakefulness, why do I wake up when REM initiates? Why can't I sleep unless I take some kind of drug? I've studied my own sleep to death and still have no answers.
Taking 2 Elavil (which equals 50mg) brought the sweaty-panicky-frequent waking down from 4 times a night to just once last night and the night before. However, even though I don't get any other side effects from regular daily doses of Elavil, taking 50mg makes it really hard to wake up and get going in the morning. I got up at 10am but I didn't wake up til around, oh, 3 or 4 this afternoon. And it makes me stumble around like a drunken monkey when the alarm goes off. When my alarm went off yesterday morning, I flew out of bed like normal & discovered my legs weren't fully cooperating with the rest of my body, so I did a nifty knee-and-ankle wrenching dance until I decided to just sit back down on the bed for a minute or two. Then when I tried to get back up & turn my alarm off, it took my hand about 4 more minutes to remember how to turn the alarm off. I succeeded in changing the radio station, the volume and the dimmer on the LED time display. This morning I thankfully woke up before the alarm went off :P I took it somewhat slower getting out of bed - just sort of sat up & worked my way onto my feet. I can't keep taking 50mg because of the whole tolerance issue. I want the Elavil to keep working for awhile longer before I am forced to up the dose.
The only reason I woke up before my alarm went off was because I was having a creepy spider dream. We're talking hordes of spiders. Ugheek.
Insomnia is the worst thing. It'd be different if I was one of those lucky people who only need 4 hours of sleep, but I feel like absolute crap if I don't get about 8 - 10. I'm exhausted, but not sleepy. My knees and hips ache, my lower back aches, but if I try to lay down I just lay there, waiting for time to pass. It's not like my mind is racing or anything. I'm just laying there, wide awake and wanting death to come quickly. I have excellent sleep hygiene, too. Only use my bed for sleeping and sex, I only go to bed when I'm sleepy, I don't lay in bed & do my taxes or anything, there's no arguing or television in my room, I keep the temperature low but not too low, I avoid caffeine after a certain time, I don't go to bed angry or hungry, I sleep in the dark (now that I can sleep when it's dark - sometimes I still have to use a nightlight)... it's always quiet in the house & if I play music it's somnorific, not like Rob Zombie or NIN or anything raucus. I do everything right when it comes to my bed, my bedroom and preparing for sleep... so why can't I sleep? What triggers my wakefulness, why do I wake up when REM initiates? Why can't I sleep unless I take some kind of drug? I've studied my own sleep to death and still have no answers.
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-02 09:10 am (UTC)There are lots of diseases that can't go away with a pill. Cancer is one of them.
There are blood tests that can rule out auto-immune CFS, and I'd recommend going for a blood panel to look for an elevated C-reactive protein which causes all the symptoms of CFS, but can be a sign of a different auto-immune disease, or of a glandular or lymph-based virus.
There's no point fretting about 'fatal familial insomnia,' (by the way, most psychological disorders cause insomnia and not the other way around) until you've got such blood panels down, and then pair up with your doctor to get to the bottom of something that is disturbing you so greatly. *hugs*
I have a lot of the banner symptoms of CFS, but my CR-P is always up, so... no diagnosis yet. But I have the more classic symptom of needing sleep a LOT, but it not actually helping me at all.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-03 04:15 am (UTC)It's just, ugh, I'd like to have a reason for feeling so blegh 90% of the time. Some kind of name, something I could blame it on. Even when things go well for me I still feel physically like crap. I long for sleep but when I'm having one of my insomnia weeks (like this one), wanting does not make it happen.
The medical field peeps responsible for knowing such things are pretty sure that FFI is one of those prion diseases - the psychological effects (insomnia, hallucinations, insanity, coma and death) are because the brain is wasting away... but it's inherited or passed down somehow, not directly caused from eating human flesh or infected livestock. I've been a pincushion for the medical community for quite a few years now... it'd be just another blood test. Or maybe a PEP test. I think having the opportunity to have a PEP test might be cool in a scientific-experiment-victim kind of way.
The whole thing that started this line of thought up again was the stupid barking ghost. I remembered seeing the bird-mask in old woodcarvings or paintings, looked up 'bird carnivale mask', which led me to the plague-doctor, which led me to an account of an Italian family who has suffered from FFI for a couple of hundred years. Random aunts & uncles & cousins all with insomnia, insanity, coma & death. I'm embarrassed by the fact that I even know about FFI in the first place. It's an obscure disorder & hasn't even been glamorized like CJD or koro or anything. Watching my oldest sister fight sleep to the point where she goes into a seizure can be convincing.