Just Thoughts
Apr. 11th, 2005 12:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
perzephone
So today was my first day in a month w/out Ambien... again. I need a new doctor - one that will give me more than a 2 month supply at a time. Anyway, I actually fell asleep around 9:30 this morning. Around Noon:30, I heard what sounded like a stadium full of people cheering, woke up, adrenaline rushed, heart pounding. Couldn't fall back asleep (naturally)... masturbated til I did fall back asleep (works almost every time). I wake up a lot because I always seem to have a crowd of people making noise in my head. I also dreamt something about pissing dark blue, staining my pristine white panties & hands. Odd. Understandable, tho, because between discussions of natural UTI remedies on tribe & trying to remember which herb makes a dark blue essential oil (chamomile, not St. John's Wort), dreaming about blue urine seems natural.
I'd like to go to to a sleep specialist, but the idea of spending the night in a lab w/a bunch of electrodes taped to my head... I don't think I could fall asleep in a place like that w/out artificial tranqulization anyway, so it's kind of pointless. I just have this nagging feeling about 'fatal familial insomnia'... Very few people I'm related to actually have an easy time with sleep. Genetic testing is also very, very expensive, and I don't think my insurance cares about me that much.
From Merck:
Fatal familial insomnia is a prion disease that interferes with sleep, leading to deterioration of mental function.
Fatal familial insomnia is a genetic disease, due to a specific mutation in the PrPc gene. However, the disease can occur spontaneously, without a mutation. This form is called sporadic fatal insomnia. Fatal familial insomnia and sporadic fatal insomnia differ from other prion diseases because they affect predominantly one area of the brain, the thalamus, which influences sleep.
The disease usually begins between the ages of 40 and 60 but may begin in a person's late 30s. Most often, it runs in families. At first, people may have minor difficulties falling asleep and occasional problems with muscle movements. Eventually, they lose the ability to sleep. Other changes include muscle twitching, rapid heart rate, and dementia. Death usually occurs after about 7 to 36 months of illness. No treatment is available.
Of course, there's always Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease, the human version of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease)... and considering how much raw hamburger meat I've eaten in my lifetime... eh, it's probably just the depression, or the graveyard shift work - even tho I can't sleep at night, either, because I'm awake anyway. Even when I was little. I wouldn't get sleepy til 4 - 5am. My mom & dad could not enforce a 'bedtime' on me because I would be awake long after they fell asleep - they couldn't stay awake long enough to make sure I was actually sleeping. Of course, it made school a bitch. I'd want to sleep after 5am, but noooo, I had to get up to go to school. Half the time I didn't sleep except for on weekends - be up all night, at school all day, couldn't get away w/going to bed til 9 or 10 at night when I'd be AWAKE again. They just gave up - let me stay up & watch old black & white horror movies on the couch. I saw some great movies... 'Abbott & Costello Meet Dracula/the Mummy/the Werewolf', 'Them', 'The Bad Seed' (which was on AMC last weekend, but Rob couldn't stand the dead kid's mom's bawling & pleaded w/me to change the channel so we ended up watching the Food Network all night), all those Hammer flicks, 'Hell House' w/all the heads planted in the fields. I also used to go roaming around & stealing people's flowers to give to my mom. The neighbors had no clue that I was the 4am Flower Marauder. I don't know what my mom ever thought of the bunches of flowers I used to leave all over the house, either. She never said 'thank you', but I don't remember ever getting yelled at about it or told not to leave the house in the middle of the night. That's the benefit of living in a town like Sumner, WA in the early 80's - a 7 year old kid could wander around picking the neighbor's flowers at the break of day & no one cared. Television seemed a lot more interesting, too - old movies til the 'Station Identification' & 'Sign-Off', that last commercial w/the old Indian guy crying over littering, and the multi-colored bars came on. Now at 4am I have a wide variety of infomercials and repeats from earlier in the day. How many times can one watch the same episode of 'Iron Chef America', anyway?
Alcohol interferes w/the dreaming process, but it's been a month or so since I got drunk the last time, & I haven't had a drop since. It's mostly curiosity, the thing about, well, exactly why do I have such a hard time staying asleep? Why, when I wake up after 3-4 hrs. of sleep, do I feel like I'm having a panic attack? Why are there crowds of people making crowds-of-people noises in my head? Today it was cheering, like right after the Brazilian announcer yells "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!", but sometimes it's just that sort of ocean-wave muttering murmuring crowd-of-people noise.
I'd like to go to to a sleep specialist, but the idea of spending the night in a lab w/a bunch of electrodes taped to my head... I don't think I could fall asleep in a place like that w/out artificial tranqulization anyway, so it's kind of pointless. I just have this nagging feeling about 'fatal familial insomnia'... Very few people I'm related to actually have an easy time with sleep. Genetic testing is also very, very expensive, and I don't think my insurance cares about me that much.
From Merck:
Fatal familial insomnia is a prion disease that interferes with sleep, leading to deterioration of mental function.
Fatal familial insomnia is a genetic disease, due to a specific mutation in the PrPc gene. However, the disease can occur spontaneously, without a mutation. This form is called sporadic fatal insomnia. Fatal familial insomnia and sporadic fatal insomnia differ from other prion diseases because they affect predominantly one area of the brain, the thalamus, which influences sleep.
The disease usually begins between the ages of 40 and 60 but may begin in a person's late 30s. Most often, it runs in families. At first, people may have minor difficulties falling asleep and occasional problems with muscle movements. Eventually, they lose the ability to sleep. Other changes include muscle twitching, rapid heart rate, and dementia. Death usually occurs after about 7 to 36 months of illness. No treatment is available.
Of course, there's always Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease, the human version of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease)... and considering how much raw hamburger meat I've eaten in my lifetime... eh, it's probably just the depression, or the graveyard shift work - even tho I can't sleep at night, either, because I'm awake anyway. Even when I was little. I wouldn't get sleepy til 4 - 5am. My mom & dad could not enforce a 'bedtime' on me because I would be awake long after they fell asleep - they couldn't stay awake long enough to make sure I was actually sleeping. Of course, it made school a bitch. I'd want to sleep after 5am, but noooo, I had to get up to go to school. Half the time I didn't sleep except for on weekends - be up all night, at school all day, couldn't get away w/going to bed til 9 or 10 at night when I'd be AWAKE again. They just gave up - let me stay up & watch old black & white horror movies on the couch. I saw some great movies... 'Abbott & Costello Meet Dracula/the Mummy/the Werewolf', 'Them', 'The Bad Seed' (which was on AMC last weekend, but Rob couldn't stand the dead kid's mom's bawling & pleaded w/me to change the channel so we ended up watching the Food Network all night), all those Hammer flicks, 'Hell House' w/all the heads planted in the fields. I also used to go roaming around & stealing people's flowers to give to my mom. The neighbors had no clue that I was the 4am Flower Marauder. I don't know what my mom ever thought of the bunches of flowers I used to leave all over the house, either. She never said 'thank you', but I don't remember ever getting yelled at about it or told not to leave the house in the middle of the night. That's the benefit of living in a town like Sumner, WA in the early 80's - a 7 year old kid could wander around picking the neighbor's flowers at the break of day & no one cared. Television seemed a lot more interesting, too - old movies til the 'Station Identification' & 'Sign-Off', that last commercial w/the old Indian guy crying over littering, and the multi-colored bars came on. Now at 4am I have a wide variety of infomercials and repeats from earlier in the day. How many times can one watch the same episode of 'Iron Chef America', anyway?
Alcohol interferes w/the dreaming process, but it's been a month or so since I got drunk the last time, & I haven't had a drop since. It's mostly curiosity, the thing about, well, exactly why do I have such a hard time staying asleep? Why, when I wake up after 3-4 hrs. of sleep, do I feel like I'm having a panic attack? Why are there crowds of people making crowds-of-people noises in my head? Today it was cheering, like right after the Brazilian announcer yells "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!", but sometimes it's just that sort of ocean-wave muttering murmuring crowd-of-people noise.
