Sleepless

My sleeping pattern has deteriorated over the past few years. Acid reflux problems started sometime in my mid-30's and worsened as I took less care of my diet and exercise. Early on I would keep a bottle of Maalox tablets on the beside stand. Usually at around 3:00AM I would be awakened by a burning esophagus, sit bolt upright, chug a pint of water to dowse the flames, chew up a couple of Maalox tabs, usually lemon cream flavored, chug more water to wash down the chalky tablet remnants and then struggle back to sleep propped up on pillows keeping my torso inclined.

As I slid down the ramp of pillows, in my sleep, I would wake in the morning with a sore neck and back. This in turn led to dizziness and more sleeping difficulty. Then came my hip deterioration and associated pain which caused me to toss and turn. I went from a solid 8 or more hours per night to 6 or 5 or less hours of broken sleep. Somewhere in the midst of the above problems I started to snore pretty heavily, loud enough to wake my wife who then jab me with an elbow to get me to roll over. This usually worked, for her. Often I was left awake. She would immediately fall back to sleep and begin snoring softly. I would often get up and turn on the TV.

Work and financial stresses added up for a while and I went through a long period of sleeping 3-4 hours per night. This is OK once in a while, but when it's every night, for weeks, the body starts to suffer. The dizziness worsened. When weeks turned to months I was reduced to a shell of my former self.

I don't like going to the doctor. I was falling apart, I got quite sick and told the doctor about my sleeplessness. He prescribed Ambien. A lifesaver. I slept every night for months. I would take a pill and 20 minutes later I needed to be close to the bed, because I was going to sleep. I know there's some addictive properties to sleeping medication but I didn't care I was sleeping and my body started to recover. I had energy.

My hip got progressively worse and the Ambien became less and less effective. I think I now have a resistance to it and will often not fall asleep until 3:00 or 4:00AM. I've been off work for a few weeks, so staying up late isn't too big of a problem. I can nap during the daytime if I need it, but I seem to be on the verge of a problem. It was every once in a while that I couldn't sleep, then it became more frequent and now it's often on back-to-back nights.

Sleep is critically important to overall health and cognitive ability. When my sleep problems were at their worst I was very ineffective at work. I made lots of mistakes and forgot lots of important details. Even my normally good note taking became difficult for me to transcribe into meeting minutes. I became very reactive and not a good planner which is a critical handicap for a project manager whose responsibility is to drive project schedules.

I'll be going back to work in a couple of weeks, hopefully, and will need to get this situation in check before the cycle repeats. I like to sleep and I like to be productive and sharp-witted. In the meantime I'll have more time to post here.