I’ve suffered from varying degrees of insomnia as long as I can remember. Even when I was little when all the neighborhood kids got up early on the weekends to see the cartoons, I was still sound asleep because I was awake at 3 am. I first noticed I had a problem around 10 years old. My friend Tommy and I had a sleep over every weekend and always had “a plan.” The plan always had something to do with staying up very late to do something we weren’t supposed to do and invariably, Tommy was always sound asleep by midnight and I was forced to lie awake in my cot for several hours.

Then I remember not being able to sleep at all or very, very little while at week long summer Boy Scout camps when I was in junior high. These camps terrified me because it meant that after Wednesday, I’d be a zombie until my parents picked me up on Sunday. I went to three of those and none were particularly pleasant.

By high school, I’d learned to deal with it and it only became a problem when my lack of sleep adversely affected my cycling performance. It was irritating, but manageable.

In college, I was a mess. My new found freedom let me stay up as long as I wanted and it made things worse. See, I just don’t get tired. When I lie down and turn off the lights, my brain turns on. I’m not anxious nor a worrier, I just think about all sorts of things. I quickly realized that I had two choices for classes. Either take 6:30 am classes or take the 6:30 pm classes. If I scheduled any classes between 9:30 am and 5 pm, I was just going to end up skipping too many to be successful. And we don’t need Paul Harvey to tell us “the rest of the story” on this one…

After college, every night became the same. Around 7-8 pm, I’d start to think about mitigation plans around sleep. Could I make it through tomorrow if I didn’t get a wink? Could I somehow leave early if I really had to? All this crap really affected my social and sex life. Thinking about sleep almost became an obsession for me. Tylenol PM type products (anything containing at least 25mg of Diphenhydramine hydrochloride) worked for a few weeks but then lost their effectiveness so I quit. I figured I just had to live with it. Despite insomnia being a pretty common problem, I had met very few individuals who had it and absolutely nobody who suffered like I did. In 2002, I met Amy’s best friend Cami who was also a chronic insomniac who was actually worse than me. This actually made me feel a ton better, especially when she was prescribed the anti-depressant Zoloft and her symptoms went away. Cami was anything but depressed but the Zoloft helped her “turn her brain off” when she got in bed. She urged me to see a doctor. The doctor I saw prescribed Ambien which made me hallucinate, gave me very long and inappropriate erections, made me forget everything that happened about 20 minutes after taking it and promptly quit working just four days later. I went back to that doctor but she accused me of trying to “scam her” into getting more Ambien (even though I brought back four pills I still had) so I just gave up.

Tomorrow I’ll continue with this story and tell you what my new doc says about the problem.

(Read Part II)