Before I sign off, I’d like to thank the Academy, All Wheel Drive and most unexpectedly my acute insomnia.

It’s that time of the year again, the KJH (Kirkland Jr. High) magazine fundraising drive. Amy’s school does this the first month of every year to raise money for… well, something. It says it’s for the kids so it must be good. I always load up on these because I love the kids. Ok, well, I love magazines. They really are perfect for me since I have the attention span of a Brazilian Tapir…

Wait, what was I writing about? …

Oh, yeah, my attention span isn’t that great and the normal magazine article is about all I can handle. If my insomnia should strike (pretty rare, maybe 364 days per year), I can flick the light on, read a good article and hopefully think about something that will bore my brain enough to shut itself off.

Here’s what I ordered:

1) Backpacker
2) Fast Company
3) Forbes
4) Fortune
5) Mac Addict
6) Maximum PC
7) National Geogrpahic Adventure
8) Smithsonian
9) Wired
10) Teen People

Ok, just kidding about #10, they were sold out :(

Most if not all are renewals but off the list this year is Discover. Though I’m a science fiend, that magazine just bores the hell outta me for some reason.

(Ok, I wouldn’t wake up that much but that’s not the point of this post…)

Now that I have the insomnia problem artificially and (most likely) temporarily, I’ve been thinking a lot about my sleep cycle and wake time. Waking up feeling refreshed is not a matter of how much you sleep, It’s about waking up in the correct stage of your sleep cycle. Here’s a good article explaining sleep cycle in detail. In short, if you want to wake up feeling refreshed, the aXbo Sleep Phase Alarm Clock claims it can help.

To use it, simply put on the wireless wristband, set the time you need to wake up no matter what, and the aXbo alarm clock will attempt to detect the right time to wake you up, within a specified time window (e.g. 30 minutes).

The obvious advantage over similar products like SleepTracker, is that the alarm won’t get muffled when you tuck your hands under the pillow. The aXbo also runs on mains and/or batteries, eliminating the problem of the alarm running out of juice in the middle of the night. And as a bonus, the aXbo also comes with 3 sleep-inducing melodies which automatically stop when aXbo notices that you’re asleep. I’d like a little more detail about how the device detects your sleep cycle accurately (it can’t do that measuring pulse or blood pressure) but it sounds like a kick ass idea and something I’d be willing to try.

(via Engadget)

Friday night 8/19: Asleep by 2:30 am (stayed awake on purpose to sleep in on Saturday morning)
Saturday morning 8/20: awake by 7:19 am
Saturday night: none (moved SOL to the new datacenter)
Sunday morning: Fell asleep around 8:30 am
Sunday afternoon: Despite being awake for 25 hours, woke up around 11:50 am
Sunday night: Asleep by 10:45 pm
Monday morning: Awake by 6:10 am
Monday night: Asleep by midnight
Tuesday morning: Awake by 5:00 am when Amy got up to go to the gym
last night: Asleep by 8:30 pm
this morning: Awake by 1:50 am (came into work around 4 am)

I won’t sleep again until Friday night because we’re moving 13 critical servers tonight during the maintenance window.

So what gives? Stress? I don’t think so. 1) I’m not that susceptible to stress and 2) the hardest part was completed on Saturday. It’s just the instant I wake my mind is racing instead of the usual 1-3 hours it normally takes to ramp up to something resembling consciousness.

And just because I’m spending so much time at work does not mean that I’m being productive. I’m in such a daze that doing almost anything minor is nearly impossible to force myself to do. Little administrative tasks are piling up and will soon stretch 5/8 the of the way to the moon. I haven’t ridden in nearly 10 days and I’ve completely lost the desire to do so. I’m also pining for some alone time. Everyday is meeting after meeting after meeting and all I think about in them is just sleeping or vegging. I feel like Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys where he’s in the asylum staring up at the TV and just drooling. Just give me my Thorazine drip now, please.

Maybe it’s because we have no viable backup or backout option. Or maybe it’s because I’m relying on a 3rd party (though properly vetted and extremely qualified) vendor to physically move the equipment. I can’t control nor ever worked with them. Or maybe it’s because I’m 0-5 in major project executions. Regardless of the reason, I’m still surprised that I’m not sleeping and have 24×7 butterflies. I wake up constantly during the night wondering if I’ve forgotten anything or if there might be a better way to do x task. I know that worrying and planning things to death not only don’t help but probably hurt and this activity is self defeating. Worrying about things is pretty stupid and I can’t stand to be around people who do.

This is probably a stupid rant caused by 6 hours of sleep in 5 days.

I lnow it will go fine and that’s why I’m so pissed at myself…

I’m in trouble folks. This crap is getting worse by the month and is consuming my life. Yes, I have tried all the medication ways and looking back, I might have just been better off without trying anything but I can’t go back now. I don’t even know if I can go back to see the doctor because it would just be to damn embarrassing. Something’s gotta give here.

My recent battle with pneumonia made me finally get off my ass and find a GP doc. I ended up going with the one I first saw at the urgent care center but I really liked her and her location in Issaquah is convenient so it all worked out. On a side note, I’ve always preferred female doctors for some reason and generally trust their advice more than a male’s.

Anyway, doc had me come in every couple of days for checkups (my lungs were really bad) and she had me fill out the cursory five page, medical history. Insomnia was on the list and I checked it not thinking too much of it. Doc noticed it and we talked for a long time about my struggles with sleeping. I told her I had tried Ambien but didn’t like it and she knew exactly why, lol. She didn’t prescribe me anything then because I was already on a truckload of crap already but she’d have something for me when I came back on the following Friday.

On the nights before the appointment, I found myself anxious for Friday like it was Christmas morning. Hell, I didn’t care if she prescribed me Ambien because I was so desperate for anything that could help. Please, please, please let her give me something good, I thought.

On Friday, she gave me a one month’s prescription for Trazodone, an anti-depressant. Here are some interesting things I’ve found out about Trazodone:

General:
Trazodone, is a modified cyclic antidepressant. Trazodone belongs to the group of medicines known as antidepressants or “mood elevators.” It is used to relieve mental depression and depression that sometimes occurs with anxiety.

Pharmacology:
n animals, trazodone HCl selectively inhibits serotonin uptake by brain synaptosomes and potentiates the behavioral changes induced by the serotonin precursor, 5-hydroxytryptophan.

Peak plasma levels occur approximately one hour after dosing when trazodone HCl is taken on an empty stomach or two hours after dosing when taken with food.

For those patients who responded to trazodone HCl in clinical trials, one-third of the inpatients and one-third of the outpatients had a significant therapeutic response by the end of the first week of treatment. Three-fourths of all responders demonstrated a significant therapeutic effect by the end of the second week. One-fourth of responders required 2-4 weeks for a significant therapeutic response.

Warnings/ Side effects:
Trazodone has been associated with the occurrence of priapism (inappropriate and excruciatingly long erections). In approximately 1/3 of the cases reported, surgical intervention was required and, in a portion of these cases, permanent impairment of erectile function or impotence resulted. Male patients with prolonged or inappropriate erections should immediately discontinue the drug and consult their physician. If the condition persists for more than 24 hours, it would be advisable for the treating physician to consult an urologist or appropriate specialist in order to decide on a management approach.

Insomnia. Trazodone has been associated with the occurrence of insomnia. (WHAT?)

I know drug makers have to warn about every possible side effect but I was concerned that almost every website warned about the drug causing insomnia, though they also said that Trazodone is often used to treat insomnia.

Make no mistake though, I’m not anywhere near depressed, it’s just that serotonin reuptake inhibitors often help insomniacs “turn off” their brain at night and allow them to sleep.

So how has it helped me? I’m on my third night and I have to say that the only difference I’ve noticed are incredibly vivid dreams (and not the good kind either, lol). I haven’t fallen asleep any earlier than I would have normally but most of the research I read on Trazodone said that it takes 8-10 days for the drug to become effective. We’ll see.

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)