You know how when most people lose a few nights of sleep, they get bags under their eyes? Well, I have a full set of luggage and it isn't quite complete enough to look like I got in a fight. This August marks three years of awful sleep for various known and unknown reasons. We've gone through several neighbors in that next door apartment. Each of them has been loud, with a tendency to fight at full volume at all hours of the night, and had a large dog that howled for them when they weren't home. The noise enough screws with my sleep. It doesn't help with my cptsd.
I struggle to get back to sleep whilst having flashbacks to my parents fighting over money from when I was a small child. Between their fighting, telling me that I was the reason they were poor, and a lot of other ugly stuff that was said, I guess I was around eight thinking that I'd be more valuable being sold as body parts on the black market and the money funneled to them. Pretty screwed up, eh? So, here I am about two score years later, with those thoughts running around in my head and fear that my parents are going to catch on that I heard them and they're going to beat me for it.
Now, putting that horror aside, I'm in perimenopause. The hormones screw up your sleep cycle there too. It seems like my body is looking for more ways to hate me because I just got a diagnosis of sleep apnea. I get the CPAP machine next week and I'm hoping it helps with that. And that heavy blanket that helps me feel safer at night, it's a weighted one that weighs almost as much as a toddler, seems to be making the sleep apnea worse. So, I may have to give that up. I don't know what a good alternate solution for my night time anxiety will be.
My psychologist has been a champion through all of this. He's been carefully tailoring my psychiatric medications to try to help with out interfering with my other medications. He's a bit at wits end on this matter to. So, when I got prescribed a sleep consult with the clinic up in the city, he immediately began telling me what to expect (because I was anxious) and about his experience. He also was so kind as to explain what a CPAP machine does and how it has helped him. I came away from that discussion reassured and ready for the video conference with the sleep doctor's PA.
In that video conference, I got my diagnosis and a very through explanation of everything from what is sleep apnea to how a CPAP machine works. With the discussion of sleep apnea, there was an explanation why I could sleep a whole night through and wake up exhausted. I'm hoping the CPAP machine is the silver bullet on this one.
1 comment:
looks at the subject line this is what I get for typing with out my glasses.
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