It's a Give and Take

Update on my sleeping: I had a revelation the other day. Wait for it....I feel awake!

Yay, I don't get exhausted randomly and often throughout the day. I don't think "if only I had a soft pillow right now..." anymore. I don't fall asleep during staff meetings. I have a memory again! I feel alert most of the time. I think I'm normal feeling now.

I went to see my specialist on Thursday 2 weeks ago. He doubled my dosage because, although I have been feeling better, I continue to have hallucinations, sleep walking and sleep talking. The clonazapam is supposed to shut my brain's door at night so my body will stay still while my brain is actively prancing around without my body's knowledge. Since that wasn't happening, he doubled my dosage and said "Let's see!"

Well, it worked. It worked too well. Not only did I not wake up, or move, or talk or anything strange at night, but I couldn't get up to my alarm clock either! Me! Not waking up on time! What!?! That meant, the 5am wake up call for the gym turned into a 6am wake up call to get up to go to work which resulted in me hitting the snooze button 2-3 times and then I would have to scurry to get ready for work!

Before this, the snooze button was a useless button to me. Who uses snooze button, I always thought. Why prolong the inevitable. Just get out of bed and set your alarm for when you actually need to get up. Not only was I using the snooze button, but I was actually going right back to sleep in seconds. I tried taking the pills earlier in the night but the same thing kept happening. Once I was up it was ok, but getting up was so hard.

I reduced my dosage back down to half. I guess I'm just going to have some night time happenings but it doesn't matter because, overall, I have had a significant improvement in the daytime. Don't get me wrong, I still want to go to bed around 9pm, but I'm ok almost all day long. I have days where I'm tired, but it's more physical tired or mental exhaustion from work - not this unknown force that was pressing down on me that I couldn't get out from under it.

So, I will merrily go along now feeling better with the medication. Except, there's the "take" part. I don't have desire for food anymore. At first, I thought "This is awesome!" thinking I wouldn't overeat and feel bad anymore. I would just eat healthy and be fine. But then I started to realize, I don't care to eat anything which would mean I would skip a meal because nothing appealed to me, then I would get grumpy (as one would normally do when they didn't eat). It would be ok most days at work because I had a routine of eating but I didn't want dinner (it never was my favorite meal of the day). Me not wanting to eat meant not cooking for Bruce either. It also meant my stomach was grumbling around 8pm then I would finally eat but then I would not want to go to bed because I had just eaten. Also, I would rather just eat what was laying around rather than go through the effort of making food because it didn't matter what I ate since I don't care about food anyways! This means eating cookies and apple - balanced, right?

The other thing? I didn't realize how sad it would be to lose the enjoyment of food. I still know if it tastes good, I just don't have desire for it. I don't really care to try things anymore. I do it out of habit or because I think "I used to like this" but it's just not there. Who knew losing enjoyment from food would be sad - like a friend moving - you don't realize how much you enjoyed the company until it was gone.

There's hope! Starting January I'm trying to use diet as a way of decreasing my symptoms. My doctor has been supportive of it and I want to see how it goes. I read about some people who had worse symptoms than me that had changed their lives with diet. I'm already a pretty healthy person so I hope it will still change mine as drastically as these other people so that I can have a normal pregnancy (that's the goal now, be normal without medication so I can have a baby without harming me or the baby with sudden sleep attacks). The diet sounds simple too:
1. no caffeine (check, I don't typically have caffeine in any of it's forms - coffee, tea, soda or chocolate - pat on the back for me!)
2. no sugar (Ok, this is harder. On the meds it's fairly easy since I don't care about food, but we're talking about getting off them and then having the self control not to binge on the lovely tasting morsels. I think I can. I think I can.)
3. eat meat only at breakfast and/or lunch (apparently, meat, being a protein, is an "alerting" food. It's best to eat it early when you want to feel awake and energized to complete your day)
4. avoid meat at night and, instead, choose complex carbs (easy, this is the way I like to eat anyways - NO MEAT. Sadly, this will mean every meal Bruce and I eat together will be different because he has to have a high protein, high calorie diet for his health. Go figure).

My doctor told me I have to be like a soldier. He's all for me trying anything that makes the symptoms lesson, but I have to have a strict routine. That's my chance. Get up and go to bed at the same time, even on weekends. Eat a healthy diet with the food spaced evenly throughout the day. Avoid stress (hehe) and exercise regularly. I can do this, right?