SLEEP

"Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care/ ... sore labour's bath/Balm of hurt minds "

Ah yes, sleep is such a good thing. Researchers have long proved that Shakespeare was quite correct when he wrote that sleep heals the wounds of the day, smooths over the mind's hurts, rebuilds the used muscles, restores the body in every way. They have gone on to find that those who do not sleep well have more pain, more weaknesses, less mental alertness. Sad, isn't it... And yet, that is the state in which I find myself all too often.

You see, at bedtime, I am wide awake. It doesn't matter what I have done during the day. At everyone's usual bedtime, I am wide awake; and if I do go to bed at 10 or 11, or midnight, I do not go to sleep as do most people. Rather, I lie there wide awake and think of everything I have done that day, everything I might do the next day, and everything I want to do for the next year. I have spent hours at night replaying things I had done during the day whether that was weaving a lamp shade or teaching grammatical constructions. I have held long, involved conversations with people I might encounter the next day. I have replayed conversations from the past day. Everything except sleep.

Oh, I finally sleep after a night or two of this, but that sleep never has seemed to help. My 'ravelled sleeve' of care simply was never 'knit up;' my tired muscles never were restored. I would wake in the mornings as tired as I had been the night before. Mornings were terrible for me. I felt like Garfield without his coffee. And then, I read that those with Fibromyalgia had the problem of non-restorative sleep and I immediately identified that as my problem. I could sleep and sleep (as I so often did on weekends trying to 'catch up' ) and still feel as if I needed to sleep even more. Sleep was not restoring that which had been used up in living and I did not know what to do about it.

For years, I tried everything: valerian, melatonin, herbs of every kind; trytophan, Benadryl; everything anyone thought might help. At one time I resorted to Valium for a short while, another time to Xanax. Finally, my doctor gave me Soma to help the hurting muscles relax at night and I could sleep with that; but still it wasn't the answer. After I retired and it was no longer so important to be wide awake in the morning, I gave up and sat up at night to watch TV and drift when possible, finally sleeping at daylight.

Five years ago, I went to see a sleep specialist who listened to my sad story, told me that most people with Fibro had that same problem, but that he, perhaps, had a solution. He sent me for a sleep study. It was a very good situation: the room was very nice; the bed, quite comfortable; even the electrodes didn't bother me at all. I went to sleep, but I slept the same way I did most nights, waking over and over, suddenly aware of the fact that I was not sleeping. The next morning, the technicians told me that I had actually been awake 80% of the time. And so now we knew. Apparently, much of my 'intractable insomnia' (the diagnosis) is because of Alpha Wave Intrusion which means that as soon as I go to sleep and the brain waves begin to take me down into Delta sleep, those Alpha waves pop up and I am again awake.

All I know is that I simply do not grow sleepy until about 5 in the morning. And so the sleep specialist prescribed a new medication that works, a very expensive medication derived from a herbal remedy once found in every health food store, now a controlled substance. (If I had only known about it when it was inexpensive and sold openly.) I take it and within ten minutes, I am sleeping soundly. I sleep for four hours and wake again. I take the second dose and sleep another four hours. But sometimes, after that second four hours, I still want to sleep on and on and occasionally I sleep another four hours. I hate that.

To do the right thing, the smart thing, the thing that will make me seem 'normal,' I need to stop whatever I am doing at 11 or 12 PM and while I am working well, so often feeling better than I have felt all day, take the prescription and 'knock myself out.' That bothers me also. I hate to do that. So often, I do my best work after midnight, writing, cleaning, designing, sewing, embroidering, reading: all things I have done well into the long night hours. And yet, when I do that, I often then find it just as difficult to sleep during the day, not because I cannot, but more often because I feel that I shouldn't be asleep when things are gong on. Everyone is up and busy. Why shouldn't I be doing the same. It is a very confusing way to live.

Tonight, I should have gone to bed long, long ago; and yet, it is now 6 in the morning and I am wide awake and still going. I haven't slept since 9 yesterday morning and I feel fine. This is ridiculous and I have things to do today; but I had things to do last night that I did. Staying up allowed me to accomplish some things that needed to be done. Of course, I cannot do this over and over every day. I can only hope that staying up all night once in a while will not harm me and that my sleeve of care will not become too unraveled before I sleep tonight. And I will sleep tonight. I will stop whatever I am doing at midnight and take that wonderful medication and sleep. Perhaps, I should do that every night and sleep like most people do.