The tar melted on the road? Geez.
4 1/2 days casino hopping in Vegas playing nothing but poker and roulette.
Oddly enough, it was actually my best gambling run I’ve ever had.
More here if you’re still curious…
Firstly, a 36-hour stint or so involving labor of first child.
Then, 3 days when my hysterectomy went wrong and I got a spinal headache (from leaking spinal fluid) and they put me on a caffeine IV. I have never drunk coffee, tea, or pop in my life. I thought I would levitate off the darn bed.
Probably the worst, 3 days straight when I was teaching during the days and sitting with my elderly aunt in the hospital at night. She would ‘sundown’ – basically go apeshit insane when it got dark – and I would spend the nights convincing her she had to stay in the hospital bed and that there were no assorted chickens, dogs, black men, or exploding TVs in the room. By the third day, I’m sure I made as much sense teaching as a pineapple, and couldn’t drive home. I slept for about 15 hours straight.
Between 78 and 80 hours. I have a bad knee and it was a particularly wet and snowy period back when I lived in northern Ohio. The pain was so bad even the normal opiates didn’t even cut it (vocodin AND percocet).
By the time the storm broke and I was able to sleep I was hearing a constant din in my ears, like standing just outside a huge cocktail party. I still get that sound when I’m totally exhausted, right before I fall asleep. I heard it for about a day and half that time, and no, it wasn’t the auditory cut-out you sometimes get with large amounts of pain killers.
Another time I had a bout of stress-induced insomnia where I was only able to sleep in roughly 15-20 minute increments a couple of times a night. That lasted 11 days.
Luckily, since my life fell apart for a while from 2001-2003 and I had to drive a cab just to survive, working from 5p.m. to 5 a.m., getting home at 6, getting to bed at 7, getting up at 11, job searching until 3 then getting ready for work, my insomnia completely disappeared. I went to bed and then got up so exhausted for more than 18 months that now, whenever I tell my body it’s time to go to sleep, it racks out until the alarm goes off or my wife or the dog wakes me up.
My horror story was something close to four days. It was my first semester of grad school, and it also just happened to be the hardest class in the entire ciriculum and there was a project on a concept that I REALLY didn’t like and didn’t understand. Combine that with having just started a new job working full-time for the first time out of undergrad. It was quite the living hell.
However, unlike a lot of the stories here, I was not in pain or suffering from insomnia, and after the second night I had to literally hold my eyes open while I was driving to avoid falling asleep at the wheel, and when I was working on the project, I’d have to get up and move around every couple of minutes to keep myself from passing out. I think I finally ended up falling asleep at the end for about two or three hours after finally not even being able to keep myself awake even from moving around, and just passing out while I was up and moving around.
I went 4 days with only 4 hours (all on the first night). it was damn strange to say the least, Hallucinations are fun.
Back in '91, my longest was about 56 hours-- from 6:00 am Friday to Sunday afternoon, I had to work four consecutive shifts at Taco Bell (close, open through close, then open). Couldn’t fall asleep in the few hours between closing and opening, I just kind of went home and stared at the wall.
I was a complete and utter zombie by Sunday. I think I actually may have cried at some point.
Last time I did a long stretch was in 2006. Got dumped by an ex- earlier in the week, felt like shit all week long. Woke up Friday, couldn’t even bother going to sleep until late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. Felt a LOT worse than I remembered back in high school.
The worst was what to do with yourself when you think shitty thoughts every minute of the day, and every minute feels like an hour. I think I was outside doing yardwork at 5:30 in the morning just to distract myself. God, I hate getting dumped.
72 hours. No drugs. Work-related; I worked on a hurricane-modelling team at a company that makes software used by the insurance industry to estimate their risk from large natural disasters. Sometime around 1995 or 1996 there were a couple of important storms in Florida and I was at work the entire time, prepping updates, running damage estimates and so on, all the way up past landfall. I was about 26 at the time.
Only about 36 hours, last March when I was finishing up my undergrad thesis. Got up at 5:45 AM Thursday, stayed up all night finishing the paper, went to a rehearsal at 11 AM Friday (the notes on the page kept moving around), ran around campus distributing copies to my committee, got back to my room around 3 PM and slept for a few hours.
I’m planning to start grad school in the fall, so I’ll probably beat this personal record soon.
I experimented with Meth when I was 17-18 years old for a couple of months. I stayed up for about 4-5 days or so on one bender, not too much memory of it.
Without drugs, once (at about 26 years of age) I stayed up for 36 hours trying to get a machine work in a factory (the line was down, not much choice about it)… I then slept for 6-7 hours only to work 5 16-18 hour days in a row. The problem ended up being with the machine upstream in the line. I pretty much rebuilt my machine trying to figure it out.