This was a clinical elective during my first year of med school, when you spend most of your time in the classroom. We discussed sleep disorders at length in our neuroscience course and on internal medicine rotations.
That said, there were people in my residency class who didn’t think RLS was “real”. I say the same thing I’ve always said about ADHD–if it’s so far from your experience that you can’t understand how it could be a real problem for someone else, just thank the gods that you don’t have it and shut the fuck up about it.
Anytime you start listing out the side effects of any drug you’ll find plenty that sound worse than the disease. Fortunately, most of them (including this one) are rare.
I mentioned this in another thread on this topic…I read a long article in Chicago magazine once about a local woman who took one of these drugs, and before she knew it, she had gambled away her and her husband’s entire life savings. And, as I recall, they were well-to-do people…it was a LOT of money. And, the weirdest thing was, she had never gambled before in her life! Something about it interferes with the risk centers in your brain or something.
I was prescribed Clonazepam several years ago. After three months or so I’d gained a good 15-20 pounds, was well on my way to losing my job, had driven my car into a ditch after I fell asleep at the wheel, my marriage was strained, and (in more lucid moments) I discovered that many of the emails and work projects I’d been writing were riddled with embarrassing grammatical and typographical errors.
That’s funny. Your explanation could almost apply to feeling itchy. And in some ways, it’s very much like that. You can scratch it, but once you stop, it just comes back, sometimes even stronger. And it happens right at the time of day when scratching is exactly the wrong thing that you need to be doing.
YES!!! ITCHING!!! I’ve said for years that oftentimes, the sensation is very much like the inside of my foot is itchy. Or my leg.
And there are times where it’s a genuine itch on the surface of the skin - usually one ankle, or top of a foot. I’ll claw at it nonstop for an hour and get only a few second of relief; the only thing that stops it is sticking my foot under the bathtub tap set at the hottest temp I can stand. I’d heard of that as a treatment for more “normal” itching - guess waking up the pain receptors short-circuits the other signals. I’d think it was just more normal stuff (athlete’s foot, eczema or something) except there’s never been any sort of visible rash, and it only happens at bedtime, when I’m getting drowsy.
Ah - indeed I have discussed those with the docs; didn’t make the connection. The folks at Hopkins suggested that if I was not ready to try a dopamine agonist yet, I might be helped by occasional use of Ambien or Sonata, which are listed on the page you linked. The theory being, they’d help me get some rest despite the twitchies.
I tried Ambien and though it did make me go night-night, it left me really zoned out the next day and had really dreadful rebound after even a single dose. I wound up having to weigh the current night’s insomnia against the fact that the next night, I’d have to take another dose to get to sleep, or be prepared to go until 3 AM in a dreadful not-asleep-not-awake state and be trashed the day after that. Sonata has been a better alternative for occasional use.
Ah hah! Neurontin is a valid option? That’s why mine has disappeared, then – it started fading away about the time I started taking Neurontin for unrelated issues. It may not be the preferred first line of treatment, but it certainly is one with fewer side effects than a lot of the other options mentioned – the primary (and, in fact, only) side effect I noticed was, for about three days, “a feeling of well-being.” Not euphoria or mania, just feeling good. I only wish it had lasted. Oh well, it does what it’s supposed to – and now I find it’s doing double duty. Yay for Neurontin!
How about calling it “Launched Cat Syndrome” from my habit of accidentally launching my cat from the end of the bed with a really good twitch?
The itch description is good, but you know those mad scientist devices that build up a charge, build, build, build, then it discharges? That’s what I think of mine as - the urge to twitch builds and builds, and I finally kick my leg and it’s good for a moment, then it starts to build again.
DoctorJ, I didn’t know that my legs were probably twitching while asleep, too. That would explain why I sleep very well for hours and never feel completely rested.
I finally looked at your link for disease-mongering, lobster. Interesting article, and interesting idea. At 41 years old, I have about 300 little things wrong with me; if I went to the doctor and got treated for every single little thing I have that doesn’t work perfectly, I’d be on handfuls of medication. I think the onus is on the patient to recognize when something is worth worrying about and treating, and what is just a normal part of growing old, that you can make small adjustments for in your daily life and forget about.
Meds should be used, however (or other treatments), if such ailments seriously impede our lives. The occasional cramp, or whatever, that’s one thing.
Seizures, constant severe twitching (RLS sounds a lot like St. Vitus Dance to me), major migraines that cause a person to black out, etc, whatever, THAT needs to be taken care of. Maybe not with meds, or whatever. But just anything that makes it near impossible to live a normal life, and affects our jobs, our ability to do what we need to do, or whatever. (I don’t know how else to put it)
lobstermobster, though, seems to me to care more about tweaking people and laughing at others, than TRULY concerned. Funny, I gave up that kind of shit in 9th grade.
Interestingly enough, I’ve so far felt no side effects to the Clonazepam at all. It doesn’t seem to have any sedating effects that I can notice - but of course I only take it an hour before I hit the sack anyway, so maybe it does and I’m asleep when it happens. When my prescription ran out and I couldn’t see the doctor for a week (and refused to pay the $60 annual fee for phone-in prescriptions) I didn’t have any withdrawal symptoms - except the RLS reappearing. I didn’t have any anxiety problems before, so I can’t say that it had any effect in that regard, either. For me, it’s been an amazingly hassle-free treatment.
That said, I’m inexplicably resistant to drugs that are supposed to have a mild sedative effect - codeine, antihistamines, stuff like that - so maybe it’s just me.
I don’t know how cite my own personal experience, except in the way that I just did. Unfortunately, unlike Anna Nicole Smith, I did not have a camera crew following me around to document my trainwreck-in-progress.
Fortunately, unlike Anna Nicole Smith, I recovered from mine.
Wow. I think maybe I sometimes get a very very mild case of this, but I’m not sure – I can usually beat it by doing leg stretches and leg lifts.
For those of you who definitely have RLS, does anything physical you do with your legs seem to affect it?
It feels to me like a tickle and also like… well, it’s like the reverse of the feeling you get when someone massages that one godawful spot of incredible tension in your shoulders that’s been there for days, and really nails it perfectly. Like little spasms of stale tenseness.
