Sunday 3 January 2010

Going Without Sleep

Sleep is becoming a problem again. I take all my medication at the proper time, and I make sure that I take the little blue pills that should help me to sleep.

I had been lying in bed reading when I remembered that I hadn't taken my tablets, so it was just a case of sorting out the required ones and taking them with some milk which is in a glass by the side of my bed. I had been on the verge of dropping off when I remembered that I needed to take my tablets. Having taken them, I was suddenly wide awake again.

It's now two hours since I settled down to go to sleep but sleep has not happened. I've been doing some puzzles (crosswords and suduko) in the hope that might help me to drop off, and as that hasn't worked I decided to write a quick post for the blog.

I've had to resort to the blue pills practically every night for the last couple of weeks. they do eventually help me to get to sleep but I keep waking up a few hours later. Sometimes I can get back to sleep fairly quickly, but more often I am awake for several hours before succumbing again. Then I end up sleeping for hours; most days during this last week I have ended up sleeping most of the morning.

What I really need to do is get back into a proper routine and hopefully I can manage that next week. I haven't been out of the house much over the last week or so, but on Monday I start having appointments with various people (HTT and psychologist as an example) and I will be getting to work on my OU course again. Hopefully that will help me to develop a routine that means that I can get to sleep reasonably easily and stay asleep for the rest of the night. I also need to get back to writing some more posts in the Tackling the Mental Health Minefield series as I have so much more to say on that subject.

But for now I will publish this post, wrap myself up under the duvet and hopefully drop off to sleep without too much of problem. I have a book handy so that I can read for a while, and if that doesn't work I'll just have to think of something else that might do the trick.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When you say you use little blue pills to sleep I see you don’t mention which medication it is. Sleeping was one of my major issues and having tried several of the Z recommended prescription sleeping drugs the ones that are short term but they stopped working after a while. I now use Promazine as prescribed by my Psychiatrist and take a dose of 75mg to 100mg a night although in hospital they were only giving me 25mg and that can work equally as well. It’s not addictive and I take it each evening and have been since June for sleep.

When you say you use little blue pills to sleep I see you don’t mention which medication it is. Sleeping was one of my major issues and having tried several of the Z recommended prescription sleeping drugs the ones that are short term but they stopped working after a while. I now use Promazine as prescribed by my Psychiatrist and take a dose of 75mg to 100mg a night although in hospital they were only giving me 25mg and that can work equally as well. It’s not addictive and I take it each evening and have been since June for sleep.

I know if I don’t take it I don’t sleep and I am very restless and realise my sleep issues are far from resolved despite trying many natural remedies, I guess I’ll always be an insomniac! There is also another medication which is available over the counter, a sleeping anti-histamine called Promethazine which comes in packets of 56 from pharmacies and boots which is also a good self help medication to help with sleep, something tells me or reminds me that the pills in that are blue but it’s been a while since I’ve used it!

I do hope you can resolve your sleeping issues soon, there is nothing worse that going to bed and not being able to sleep, it's the worse thing ever.