To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

"...were it not that I have bad dreams."

Well, not so much bad as insufficient.

For those of you out there in Candyland, who haven't been subjected to my tales of misery and woe, of late, that damn sleeping sickness has gotten worse, again. It is, in fact, threatening my job, again. I've been sleeping through my alarm, getting in an hour, or even two hours late, and in one memorable case (well, I don't remember it), I fell asleep at my desk. I'm told that my boss walked me to the break room where I slept on the couch for two hours. I don't remember any of it. Evidently, they noticed I was asleep because I was snoring. Deeply embarrassing.

Want to know how embarrassing this can be? Last summer, I was hanging out in the Tor office, waiting for Patrick and Teresa to finish up their work day, so that we could go out and do something -- I don't remember what. I was reading The Viscount of Adrilankah on my PalmPilot, all cheerful like. I'm sitting in the main lobby (which didn't look like much, really, since they were in temporary space, but still) and I gather I fall asleep. The first thing I know about it, Teresa is gently shaking my shoulder and suggesting that I move into her office, away from prying eyes. Evidently, some one had kindly called Teresa and said there was a girl snoring in the lobby, and wasn't she a friend of Teresa's, and shouldn't maybe something be done? Didn't threaten my job, but it was way more embarrassing. (What did I do when I got to Patrick and Teresa's office? I sat down on the floor, cross-legged, rested my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands, and went back to sleep.)

I do realize that there are many worse disabilities. However, I would just like to say that I really hate mine.

So, being a sensible person (yeah,right), I went to see a neurologist at Abbott Northwestern Neuroscience Clinic to ask for another sleep study. This would make it the second in two years, and the fourth, total. In case you didn't know, this is a lot of sleep studies for a person, even a person with sleep apnea. I think it might even be rather more frequent than most narcoleptics have to put up with, but only knowing one narcoleptic, I really have no idea.

I went, I slept under supervision. To be truthful, for a moment, I don't really mind that all that much. The only thing that's actually annoying is that I have to wear a nightgown or something similar. I do not normally wear clothes to bed. On the other hand, it's not nice to embarrass the tech. I went to bed at my usual time, wired up like a Christmas tree, and was woken up the next morning. They've improved the wiring process somewhat, which was nice. The best bit was that they didn't use what amounts to a soft clothes pin on my index finger to keep track of my pulse (I think that was it) during the night. No matter how gentle the pressure is, by morning it hurts like the devil from the constant compression. This time, they had some cool sensor which they simply taped on to my finger. No compression.

The next day, they did nap studies, which I do mind. Every two hours, they put you to bed to see if you fall asleep. If you do, they wake you up in 15 minutes. If you don't, they wake you up in 20 minutes. By the second or third nap, you're tireder than if you'd had no naps at all. What they're measuring is how quickly you fall asleep, and whether you drop into REM sleep during those naps. REM sleep is an indicator of narcolepsy. I never hit REM during my naps, but I fell asleep abnormally quickly. I also had a couple of episodes where I had a very difficult time staying awake between naps.

Monday last, I saw the doctor, who showed me all the cute charts and graphs (but no picture with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one telling what each one was to be used against me -- basically pictures of sleeping people are pretty dull). The average human being needs approximately 20% REM sleep per their night's rest. My score? 2%. No wonder I'm falling asleep at my desk. And other places. The graph also showed that I spent most of my time in the first and second stages of sleep, rarely reaching deep sleep. Also, the graph was way jagged; it looked like a comb. Normal people have something more like a sine wave.

Diagnosis? None. He said that he would write a letter to my psychiatrist, suggesting some drugs we might try, and asking her if there were any she could take me off of. This is pretty sensible. These symptoms are real consistent with negative side-effects of many psych drugs.

I like this guy, Dr. Trusheim, a lot better than the doctor I saw last time, whose conclusion was that I just wasn't getting enough sleep. He said that I shouldn't take anything to help stay awake, since that might trigger a manic episode, but drinking a lot of coffee might help, and going to be earlier was really the only answer. He did not confer with my psychiatrist at all. Now, he's one of the foremost neurologists in the country working on sleep disorders, so I find myself wondering, was I just not interesting enough, or were my brain wave results completely different two years ago? (I intend to call the hospital and ask for a copy of that sleep study. I know I had a copy, but my filing system isn't, and I have no idea how long it would take me to find it. Fifteen minutes? Fifteen hours? Easier to ask them to fax it.)

I see my psychiatrist next week, so we'll see what she wants to do. On the one hand, it feels good to be doing something. On the other hand, I'm dreading the something. Changing psych meds is a big deal. I mean, we could easily be talking a year of my life spent in various forms of emotional hell, titrating various chemicals in an attempt to find something that will work without killing me. I really, really hate messing around with my drugs. On the other hand, I need to find an answer to this falling asleep thing. I got up this morning, fed the cats, fed the fish, poured myself a cup of coffee, sat down to drink the coffee and watch the fish for a bit, just like I always do, every morning that I'm not running disasterously late. I just keeled over, and woke up at the time I should have been at work. I was an hour and forty-five minutes late. On the gripping hand, maybe I'll get my mind back. It's been rapidly going to mush, lately. The other day, I lost almost half my times tables. Admittedly, I've never had them down cold, but I was consistently getting four times eight wrong, and six times three. My verbal skills have reached a new low, and I'm having more trouble shifting from internal to external information flow. I rarely understand the first or second word that someone says to me because it takes me too long to readjust to listening to speech as opposed to whatever my brain had been doing. I've been mishearing things a lot more often, too. Don't ask me, maybe I'm just becoming deaf. It doesn't seem like it, though.

I spoke to a career counselor, last week. I hate my job, I'm insecure about being able to keep it, and I need a job with flex time. I have no ideas about what to do. I've never had any imagination when it came to jobs. I need something with flex time and insurance, and if I'm going to bother changing jobs, it should really be to something I like more than what I'm doing now. Her suggestions? Read the papers and other places that list jobs. Like I've never done that before. I can't see what I'm like at work. When I read a job description, I can't tell if I would be any good at it. I can tell if it's a no-hoper, but the rest? No clue. She also suggested that I look into disability. *snort* Maybe I should. Maybe they would help me.

My girlfriend Beth suggested that I find a rich guy to marry. You know, on an arrangement sort of basis. I think I only know one unmarried rich guy, and I a) don't think he'd marry me, and b) I'm not sure if the consequences would be worth not having to work, anymore. Marrying people's weird. No matter how much you tell your friends and family that nothing has changed, people will insist on treating you differently. I found that out almost 20 years ago, when Nigel and I got married as much because it was a lark as anything else. People are strange. Man, you should have seen how his mother and grandmother reacted. It was like a musical farce, the way they fell over each other intalling us in the only double bed in the house (after having been living together for something like six years). The funniest part was that the boxsprings were noisy. I mean, rolling over made it sound like you were having wild, jungle sex. Even if you wanted to, you couldn't have concentrated for all the noise. Bit I appear to be tangentalizing.

So, that is my tale of woe. Honest, I don't really need sympathy. I'm like, good with it, inso far as one can be good with something this annoying. However, I bitch recreationally, and I think that this is a truly monumental thing to bitch about. Great material.

Hey, if anybody has an idea of gainful employment that I might be good at, and not hate passionately, email me, would you?