A purely personal rant, having nothing to do with the board or any posts here, or a complaint about the state of the world. But I need to vent.
First, at the best of times I now have chronic insomnia. No matter what I do or how exhausted I am, I wake up around 3:00 A.M. every night dynamited out of sleep by an adrenaline surge. This is NOT “wakefulness” as such; I can be sick with exhaustion and grogginess but unable to go back to sleep due to my heart pounding and frequently accompanied by sweats and morbid thoughts. Nothing has helped, no medical test reveals anything treatable. A good night for me now is when I get 4-5 hours sleep before inevitably being awakened and IF it finally subsides by 6:00-7:00 A.M. maybe a two-hour nap afterwards. And I can’t seem to nap during the day any more; once I’m up, I’m up.
So of course the last three nights of fireworks season has been an ordeal. The police here long ago gave up on trying to enforce noise curfews. So it has been impossible to even try to go to sleep until after midnight. Last night the fireworks basically never stopped; slacked off just intermittently enough that one could start to hope that they’d finally quit, only for a fresh round to begin again (I wonder if this is an anti-police strategy to make it impossible to track down the offenders). And when they did finally seem to quit it was time for my involuntary 3:00 A.M. wakeup call.
MEANWHILE I have just started a new SSRI in the hopes of dealing with my depression and anxiety, and of course you immediately get all of the side effects while the benefits take days or even a couple of weeks to kick in.
This A.M. I reached the breaking point. I thought I was going literally psychotic (in hindsight it was a stress-induced panic attack). The combination of stress and sleeplessness amplified my SSRI side effects, and disjointed thinking convinced me that I was going into serotonin syndrome. I ended up calling 911 and being taken to the ER where they confirmed my vitals were okay, and once the A.M. adrenaline surge subsided I was well enough to go home.
The doctors advised me to give my SSRI more time, and maybe hopefully the worst of fireworks season is over.
I’ll just say that I fully sympathize. Fireworks are a PITA at the best of times and in the best of conditions, and I can only imagine how bad it must have been for you. I’d love to see inconsiderate assholes like that fined or arrested. If fireworks are legal at all, it should only be on one specific day of a specific holiday, and there should be a curfew on that night. That aside, I hope your SSRI kicks in soon.
I live in Illinois where fireworks are illegal (except things like sparklers).
You sure would not have known it Saturday night. It seemed as if WWIII had started. Police did absolutely nothing whatsoever. Honestly, they really could not have made a dent even had they tried. I like fireworks and even I found it to be too much.
Sorry about the difficulties. Anxiety and depression are enough to deal with when there aren’t actual external problems.
In my neighborhood there were fortunately very few unofficial fireworks. Every year the city reminds everyone they are illegal, and the police will take it very seriously, and then do nothing to enforce it. Not sure why people believed it this year.
The city fireworks are near enough to my house to concern my dog though. She didn’t completely freak out, but was obviously upset. She then proceeded to keep me awake all night whining and crying, even though the fireworks had been stopped for hours.
At about 1am I let her out to pee, and she came straight back in afterwards. I hoped that was it, but no, right back to the high pitched barking. Tried locking her in my room, out of my room, giving her affection, ignoring her, all the things. None of it mattered.
My kid let her out at about 6:30am, where she immediately started barking at the sky. For the next two or three hours she proceeded to intermittenly bark at the sky (sorry neighbors). When she’d said whatever she had to say, she came in and went to sleep. Me, too. Fortunately she was fine last night.
First, I’m sorry. Intractable insomnia is crazy-making. It’s also just a health risk all on its own.
Though you probably want support more than solutions (and while I clearly don’t have the solution here), I was just wondering if you’d had the first tests that come to my “IANAD” mind:
Polysomnography. This isn’t the FitBit or smart watch thing. This is an overnight, in-the-lab, hooked up to wires, electrodes, and machines thing;
I’ve got a bad heart – a really bad heart. When my body is supposed to be ‘quieting down --’ ie, at night – my heart rate slowly drops. When it does, though, my O2 saturation also drops, kicking my body into gear (baroreceptors, central sleep apnea) and calling down to the engine room for emergency power.
Which comes in the form of, basically, adrenaline.
This kind of thing can sometimes be managed with beta-blockers. Unfortunately, my heart needs to retain the ability to call on emergency power for such luxuries as … getting up the stairs. Beta-blockers … effectively confine me to the couch.
But what you describe could be physiological, rather than psychological. And physiological can certainly both cause and exacerbate psychological.
It’s that mind-body connection thing, and – IME – too many view it as a one-way street. It isn’t.
And, IIRC, you carry some weight. That could play a role in the kind of issues that the two tests I’m pointing toward are useful in diagnosing.
As I said in several of the topical threads, everyone was much better behaved this year than past. Didn’t mean there weren’t exceptions, but my issue is how often people are inconsiderate of others (Pets, Vets with PTSD, shooting stuff when the whole state is already on fire, etc.). One of my evil-genie wishes is that people were forced to be honest with themselves, though I suspect the versions of that in fiction are correct where far too many people would kill themselves rather than be forced to be that honest.
I have ongoing insomnia issues, though only a fraction as bad as yours. I will often wake with heart racing, either from apnea (I have it as a clinically defined issue, though only barely), or more frequently stress based dreams or musing. And like you, under those circumstances, if I don’t manage the immediate roll-over and fall back asleep I’m going to be up for hours, and nap very poorly.
I’ve tried a bunch of things, and had some minor relief with an off-prescription low-dose of Trazadone per my primary care doctor. It doesn’t help me fall asleep much (which is another big issue, thinking too much to drift off, and it’s often trivial things I’m stuck on), but it has been helpful on the fall back asleep front. Given Trazadone’s on-brand usage though, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t something you’d already tried.
Best of luck finding a combination of medications you can live with and endure the side effects. My wife is on her fourth blood pressure med in 12 months, and I have friends who had to tinker with their meds for years, something I’ve so far avoided.
