The Insomnia Monster

 It's 6:22 am and I have already been awake for over 2 hours. Grrrrrrr.  The night before this I only got about 1 1/2 hours of sleep TOTAL.  Sometimes I fall asleep again in the morning, other days I'm up from the middle of the night on.  I've tried medications, done a sleep lab, home testing, etc.  and still have yet to figure how how to sleep normally again, lol.  Sometimes there are reasons, such as the nightmares.  If I awake and remember a nightmare I was having, I'm scared to go back to sleep thinking that I'll be sucked back into it.  Other times it's the pain in my neck and shoulders to where I can't find any position that is comfortable to sleep in.  Other times it's because the meds didn't work for my RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome) and when that doesn't work I am up ALL night and usually crying and throwing things by morning because of the pain and exhaustion.  Then there is when I am overly tired and all I want to do is sleep, but it just never happens.

I've tried different meds (prescribed and Over the Counter) and nothing has truly helped.  The medication I was on from my psychiatrist ended up being a NIGHTMARE!!!!  I lived by myself in an apartment at the time and the medication made me so woozy and dizzy-like that I would smoke in the middle of the night and not know it.  I used to wake up to cigarettes burned into the carpeting ALL OF THE TIME!!! Then one night, I woke up to flames, yes FLAMES, in front of my face.  Evidently a cigarette dropped onto my blanket on the runner and burned through the blanket, through the runner and then through the carpeting and insulation underneath when i caught it.  Well, needless to say, I stopped that medication.  The funny (well, not so funny) thing is, that I was only on 1 of those pills and my psychiatrist told me I could take up to 3 of them AT ONE TIME!!!  Shit, I'd probably burn down the city if I took three of those things at one time!!!! I told him about it and yet he still didn't take me off of it (WTF?? Really??) so I weened myself off of it and am now totally scared to try any type of prescription sleep aid.

So, now that I can't go back to sleep, my brain decides to have fun with me and in the middle of the night, it's the monsters that tend to come out. Reflection, memories, usually the bad ones are the ones that visit me during the night. 

I actually do a lot of my writing of this blog in the middle of the night because that is what seems to keep rolling around up there.  Most people might be thinking of what they have to do the next day or what time to pick up the kids or what they need to get at the store.  Is that what my brain does? Hell no!! My brain wants to reflect and think about all of the bad things that have happened and relive them over and over and over again.  It wants to bring up the old feelings and new ones.  It wants to concentrate on my mistakes.  It wants to remind me of what a waste my life has been.  It wants to torture me with ALL of this.  And then sometimes I'm scared to go back to sleep because I'm afraid that the thoughts will turn into nightmares.  Then when I wake up, the nightmares turn into panic/anxiety attacks. Its just a vicious cycle that seems like it never wants to end, no matter what I try.  I just want to sleep again.  I want to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time.  I want to sleep more than three or four hours a night (sometimes less).  I don't want to be up for 3-6 hours in the middle of the night ALONE.  Alone with my monsters.  Alone with myself.

It's scary at times what runs through my mind, even to me.  It's also confusing and frustrating.  And tiring, OMG, I always feel like I am exhausted.  Every day is like that, it just depends on whether it is going to be mild or major. 

More than once I have almost fallen asleep while driving.  I've pulled over before to rest my eyes because I was afraid of falling asleep at the wheel.  Luckily I don't have the car everyday, but on the days  I do it's mentally and physically exhausting because I have to get up so early to get my boyfriend to work (we only have 1 car) and sometimes I'm up from 2 or 3 in the morning on and right when I want to go back to sleep is when we have to get up.  I have actually stopped seeing a lot of my specialists, I am not doing physical therapy and counseling because I can't borrow the car that many times during the week.  Going through 1 day with the car sometimes feels like a 40 hour work week to me an takes me days to get back to what is considered "my normal".  I'm sure anxiety plays a nice part in it too.  That and my PTSD.

PTSD and BPD overlap in people a lot (not always and is not required to have one to have the other), but between the triggers and the nightmares, these diseases don't want to see me sleep.

I live on Mountain Dew on days I have to do things which is not good either because I've gained a lot of weight this past winter.  I actually just got put on Oxygen while I sleep so we will have to see if that helps at all (so far not really, just burns my nose, lol). Then with my physical issues along with my mental issues, it SUCKS!!!!  Then there is the binge eating in the middle of the night which I am sure has caused some weight issues and that is something that is getting better, but again, I don't always remember doing it until I find wrappers or food laying around the next morning.  Uggggggg!!!!!!!  Now on top of that, I have anxiety of dying in my sleep.  My doctor told me that whatever they were measuring drops during the night (quite often) and that I could possibly have a heart attack.  And that scares me even more because my dad died of a heart attack.  So then if I wake up and even something doesn't feel right, I'm scared to go back to sleep for fear of dying.

It just seems like my entire life is turing into a life of fear.  I had a tire that flew off the car while I was driving down the highway last summer and I had to get over two lanes of traffic and an entrance ramp to get to the shoulder.  Have no clue how I did it without hitting anybody, but I did.  I actually thought I just had a tire that went flat until the truck showed up to help me and he said the tire was GONE!!!  He found it a ways back and it had gone over all those lanes of traffic, down a ravine, over a small creek, literally sliced through a fence and finally came to a stop in front of a tree.  He said he had never seen anything like it. 

So, needless to say, panic attacks have ensued since then (and still do) about driving because I am so scared of that or something worse happening again.  Then probably throughout the last few months, I have almost hit 6 deer and yesterday almost hit a coyote.  WTH?????  The deer a few weeks ago, I actually veered in between both of them and didn't hit either of them, again, I have no idea how. I do get scared alot easier driving now and there are certain places that I just won't drive, but I don't want to let my fears control my life.  I am probably WAAAAYYY over protective and OCD now though about making sure car doors are locked, house doors are always locked, windows are locked, (those are all from my PTSD and past abuse that I have the fear of that happening again), etc.  I don't want these fears to control my life so I try (not always successfully) to keep plugging through them and using some tools to calm my anxiety, but my panic/anxiety attacks are definitely on the rise lately.

So, if anybody has any suggestions, I would be more than willing to listen.  Until then, I guess I'll just keep writing and sleep when I'm dead I guess, right?  lol.....