Essays & General Comments

I am going through a ‘not sleeping phase’ at the moment.  I get them every so often and have tried all sorts of things to shift it, but have found you just have to wait it out.  One of the things about FMS and CFS is that you don’t sleep properly, so I should expect it.   I don’t want to take sleeping pills because they don’t sit in well with my other medication – I don’t want to become even more dopy!  I do like to take a mug of hot milk to bed with me, that is supposed to help.

I normally drop off straight after putting the light out around 10pm.  When this phase starts I usually wake up around 11.30, spend ages awake, before dropping off again.  Then wake again 3ish and remain awake.  At best I manage 5 hours at worst 3 – this is someone who regularly sleeps for 10 hours.   The worst thing about it is - it is just so boring!  The first couple of nights are ok – you go over the day in your head and think about what has been happening,  I usually come up with an idea or two to try out, and you have a couple of adventures in your head.  The next day or two, you think about the past – who, what, where, when, you remember all sorts of days out and things that have happened. 

By now you are getting a bit fed up with it all, so you start to worry – and have all sorts of negative thoughts and bad memories.  You try to compensate by having wilder adventures in your head – I pretend I am some sort of cross between Lara Croft and a female James Bond or I invent houses to explore.  This holds you for another couple of days.

‘Get up and do something’ you are saying, and I believe that the advise if you can’t sleep is to get up and occupy yourself.   I did potter down the stairs (wooden and creaky) to make a cuppa once – but the thing is the guard dog thinks it’s a new game to play: and the grumpy old goat can be avery grumpy old goat when he’s woken up in the middle of the night.  The computer makes too much noise so that’s out.  I am too tired to focus properly so I can’t read a book, design or play on the DS, my office is next to the bedroom anyway and I can’t do anything without making a noise – well you can’t can you?

So that’s it.  I lie there trying to occupy my mind and get more and more bored with it all.  It does not a huge difference to how I feel when I get up – with this illness you feel worst in the morning.  After a week it does start to make me more snappy and weepy than normal, but I don’t have to cope with much so the guys just leave me alone.

Gradually it clears.  I go through a sleep-wake-sleep-wake-sleep-wake pattern, waking every 40 or 50 minutes; then the sleep bits get gradually longer; and I settle back into my normal ‘waking once or twice but going back to sleep’ pattern.  Everything settles back down for 2 or 3 months – and it starts all over again.

Nothing I seem to do makes any difference.  It does not even seem to relate to what is going on in life at the moment.  I can be quite happy, no worries, on a roll with my craft – then it hits me and I’m stuck on the path again.