Insomnia
 

I know we're all in different time zones. I've had insomnia since I was in my early 20's. I often post here in the middle of the night. Not getting enough sleep makes me grouchy. :p Perhaps I'm having nightmares due to all the scary movies I've watched over the past two decades.

Do you post during the night? If so, do you have insomnia or are you just a night owl?

I have insomnia, but I take sleeping pills. So, no I don't post at night since I'm asleep. :)

Nope, don't post late at night. On the occasions that I do have insomnia, I take sleeping pills.

I take 3 different sleeping pills, one being over the counter. I have no trouble falling asleep but once I wake up, it takes me a while to go back to zzzzzzzz's. :)

I have a prescription - I don't wake up once I'm asleep......until morning, that is.

That must be wonderful. I have to take naps sometimes. I don't like sleeping all day as it causes more insomnia at night. I'm a night owl but being awake in the wee hours of the morning is kinda lonely.

I was posting until three in the morning (english time) last night.

I never sleep, at least thats how it feels sometimes. ;) I'm really a night person, but since my husband is on second shift, we are up most of the night anyway (which is why I don't post too much late at night, we're usually watching movies or something). But I have never slept well, I often wake up every hour or so, when I do sleep through I often have VERY vivid nightmares. I've scared people :p I talk, I move around a lot, sometimes scream, or cry. Its like....a horror movie....muhahaha.

My doctors have wanted to prescribe something, but I am leery of sleeping pills. I'm afraid of taking something that will make me feel WORSE than not sleeping.

Jenna, I highly recommend Ambien. It's what I take when I have those rare bouts of insomnia due to menopause. It's not like taking a sedative where *boom* you're out - rather you fall very gently to sleep. And I've always woken in the morning not feeling like I took a sleeping pill. Always felt like I had a good night's sleep.

My dad has recommended that as well, only problem is, that man has occasionally taken one, then actually proceeds to eat all the food in the kitchen...LOL...;) One time he took one a bit too early, when my husband and I were visiting last year, and didn't make it to bed. He had a bag of chips on the table. He tried to eat the WHOLE bag. We had to take it away. I'm worried about THAT side effect as well.....:p I'll have to lock everything up.

But you're the third or fourth person I have talked to that had good things to say about it. I will ask about it next time I visit my doctor (which will be soon hopefully, I am starting to get killer migraine headaches far too regularly....ugh).

Can't say I've ever had that side effect - thank God! I'm fat enough as it is. :D Oh, Jenna, I feel for you - I get migraines from time to time, too. Not as often as when I was in my 20s and 30s, tho.

NO! Ambien is evil! I had been on it for over a year and would do things at night and not remember! Like cleaning, lighting candles, having sex (luckily only with my now husband). It's scary when you want up and can't remember things. Then I started not sleeping the whole night and had to take more to get the sleep. It has really been awful.

Now I take Lunesta, it's in the same family as Ambien so you're not groggy the next day, but it has a longer half-life and I don't wake up in the middle of the night and if I do get waken up I fall right back asleep. I can even sleep in. With Ambien once you wake up that's it. Lunesta is also for long-term, while Ambien can create serious addiction problems if taken longer than two weeks (which my jerk doctor didn't tell me and now I can't sleep at all without taking something).

Regardless of what other people and your doctor says, you should do your own research about the side effects of any sleeping pills. On the positive side, Lunesta has saved my sanity by allowing me to get a full nights sleep night after night and has really improved my quality of living since now I don't get sleep deprivation headaches and I'm not in a fog all day.

LOL....:p Its really bizarre to watch. He was like a potato chip eating zombie. ;) My mom and my brother have had them since they were kids, my grandmother didn't start having them until she was in her 50s I think. Its only been the last couple years for me, and only really started regularly the last few months or so, they are not pleasant. I think they are tied into something else, but I have no desire to go through all the tests, and everything else they put me through last time, for them say, oops, wait we were wrong, it MUST be this.....not crazy about going to the doctor office these days, but no one is. ;)

Not that I'm a doctor or anything, but my guess would be from not sleeping.

Oh trust me, I am not taking anything without researching every little thing my doctor says, I don't trust them much anymore to be honest. The eating thing is the only problem my dad has had, but no I definitely don't want to take something that will have me up wandering the house at night, I will probably fall and break my damn neck. :rolleyes:


See, I would say this too, but there are other problems. What happened was this: I was having some dizzy spells, I would get them every month or so, they would last about a week, they started to hang on longer, occur more and more, even on my wedding day, I had these damn dizzy spells. The day before my wedding they hit, and one of my eyes went blurry. Its still blurry (I wear glasses, I hoped my prescription was just off, its not). Anyway when I went to my doctor....they said high blood pressure and prescribed medication. Only.....I don't have high blood pressure, it goes up a little when I am nervous, but otherwise no problems. Then my optometrist looked in my eyes, scared the hell out me by sending me off immediately with a sealed envelope to another office. They thought it was a tumor, or some kind of deposits that was causing symptoms like a tumor. He even showed me the deposits in the first scan. They sent me for an MRI, scan came back clean (I'm thankful for that) so they thought, hey they figured out why the nerves were swollen, why my eye was blurry, what medication to put me on....YAY! NOPE. Came back to the office, one guy looks and says hey, yes, this all looks abnormal, but really its normal FOR YOU...and the THREE other doctors that saw all of the problems suddenly say, oh we must have been wrong......:rolleyes: I think my optometrist is still confused. So am I.

Turns out the dizziness is from some kind of weird inner ear problem that was pretty much solved (so far) with physical therapy. Go figure. Eye is still blurry though, and I still have the headaches, more and more frequent now.

Have you gone for a second, or even a third, opinion? I don't think I trust your doctor either!

I feel for anyone who has migraines. I get so sick that I vomit. (Yuck, I know.) Hope you all find something to help.

Scary ambien story:
Bree (my wife) was in labor with our daughter, and the contractions were killing her. So, the nurses, without bothering to check how dilated she was, gave her an Ambien to help her sleep.

The problem was, once the pill started to kick in, they got concerned about how much pain she was in and, oops, she was at 10 cm and her body was pushing the baby.

Now, Bree has an amazing drug tolerance, so the Ambien made her drowsy and completely out of it, but didnt knock her out. So she is GIVING BIRTH half asleep and damn near hallucinating. to this day she is pissed that she was messed up like that when Lily was born because she can barely remember it and she so badly wanted to be completely aware when her baby came out.



So in her case it worked like a couple of shots of vodka rather than a sleep aid.

Actually there is a new woman I will be seeing next time, I've just been putting it off, which is stupid I know.
We are in a bad area, we have to drive quite a ways to get anywhere else, but if this NEXT doctor can't help, we're setting up an appointment elsewhere. And I will NEVER be going to the eye clinic here again, if she recommends an eye specialist, we are definitely taking a drive.

Anyway, thanks for letting me vent.....:o

Vent any time, Jenna. That's what we're here for.......in addition to talking about horror, of course! :D

My mum has Night Time Panic Attacks. They involve throwing pillows at lamps, screaming, flailing her arms around wildly, and once, when my dad entered the room, she had a dream of a guy with a knife coming in, and she was trying to scoot further to the side of the bed from him. She woke up and she was on the floor, having hit her head on the bedside table, and my dad told her that she was actually doing that stuff.