Dreaming of dear Lady Sleep

Sleep is a blessed curse that taunts me in the night. She is an ellusive creature who shudders at the thought of our togetherness. The traps I set are futile as she finds a way to escape me every night and I am left a shadow of my former self. I miss her. Like the love I feel, or the air I breathe, I cannot seem to function without her. Why does she torment me so? Does she not see how I long for her company? Can she not feel the pain that is caused by our broken bond? Oh dear lady sleep, please come back to me. As the sun sets and the moon shines from above I long for you. If you come back to me, I promise that I shall love, honor, and cherish every moment we spend together.

OK, so I have decided sleep is obviously a woman. And somehow I have managed to piss her off. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, so obvioulsy she is one pissed off little lady!

Sometimes you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. Tramadol... supposedly a great pain killer as it is supposed to block the pain receptors in your brain. WRONG! For me, it gives me a headache and makes my neck hurt. BUT... if I take an Ambien afterwards, it makes everything stop hurting and I turn into a zombie before I fall into the bed and sleep like the dead. The only problems of course being that it's addictive and when I wake up I feel like there are weights attached to my arms and legs and my brain hurts. It feels like my skull is shrinking and there is just not enough room in there for my big giant brain.

Doc decides to add Ketoralac, an NSAID. (Non-Steroird Anit-Inflammatory Drug) which by the way has about the same effect as taking two tylenol.

This leaves me with 3 options:
* Drug up before sleep and feel like crap all day
* Just take the ambien and get a few hours of sleep but no enough to function
* Take nothing and skip sleep all together.

Yesterday I decided the pain was not unbearable, it was still there but not that bad. So I decided to take and Ambien and get some shut eye. Ambien and I have a Love Hate relationship. On the one hand, it shuts my brain off and puts me right to sleep. On the other hand, it only stays in your body for a few hours. It does not make me groggy in the morning and I don't sleep through my alarm going off. These are very good things. Except... I no longer sleep through my fiance's alarm going off either. And once I awake, that is it. Sleep is over, time to get out of bed before the pain in your back renders you immobile. I love that it puts me to sleep, but I hate that it does not allow me more than a four hour window of sleep.

A lack of sleep does many things to a person. I forget words, I have a hard time forming sentences, and most importantly, I feel an overwhelming urge to just kick the living shit out of anything that moves. Especially those people who feel the need to wake you from a much needed sleep. This morning I was woken up by a hand shaking me and asking me to do something (I assume "roll over" as there was a shaking hand on my stomach and some grumbling between snores coming from the other side of the bed). Three minutes later the alarm goes off. This is about the time my bladder reminds me it's time to get up. I get up, I make coffee and 45 minutes later the grumbling snoring shakey hand man come stumbling out of the bedroom. YAY! It's time for him to go to work. I can finally get my bed back.

I go crawl back into my bed, pull the covers up around me and.... And I lay there, then I turn this way and that way and no matter what I do I cannot get comfortable. Sleep left my bedroom at 2:45 this morning and she has no intentions of returning. 3:30 this morning I decided to have a cup of that coffee I made. I have been up for over 5 hours and it is not even 8:00 AM. This is ridiculous. On the plus side, I stopped crying. I think I am too tired to cry.