Sleep Disorders

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m not asking for medical advice, most definitely. I have made an appointment for next Tuesday to talk to my doctor about this, but in the meantime I’d love to hear some experiences/advice on dealing with a possible sleep disorder.

I’m pretty sure something funky is going on with my brain as far as sleep. I’ve always passed it off as “I’m just tired/didn’t sleep well last night/depression,” but honestly they always say when something gets to be so much of a problem that it disrupts your work and daily life, it’s not something to brush off.

I do have a history of depression. Moderate/mild depression has been a constant companion of mine since the age of 12. But I am being treated for it, and even on the best of my days I remain exhausted all the time.

When I was a teenager I would skip school or play sick just because I felt so exhausted. I was impossible to wake up and I was late to school on the days I went. My parents just thought I was depressed, but looking back I realize missed those 80 days out of my junior year and 60 days out of my senior year because I just felt so TIRED. I would play sick in the morning and then sleep all day. On days I went to school, I would come home at 3 and sleep until 8, and then go back to bed at 11 or 12. I would try to stay up, go to a club or see friends, but in the back of my mind I always wished I was home napping.

College was better, because I took frequent naps in between classes, and I could schedule all my classes in the afternoon.

But now that I’ve been out of school for a few years and working in the corporate world, I think my problem has returned with a vengeance. I can’t sit at my computer without my head bobbing and feeling the uncontrollable exhaustion. Most days around 10 or 11 and then again around 3 pm I have to just shut my eyes and let myself half sleep for 10 minutes because I can’t physically keep my eyes open.

Lately I have been feeling an odd dizzy sensation, like the wave of the head-bobbing feeling, all the time. It’s like my brain just can’t wake up, EVER. It’s making me miserable.

I don’t want to have sex with my husband at night because I just can’t WAIT to get back to sleep. It’s making him miserable.

I looked up narcolepsy and I almost cried I was so freaked out by how accurate the description seemed. I experience sleep paralysis often (and have since I was a teen). I have never experienced cataplexy, but EDS is right on target.

Hopefully my doctor will schedule a sleep study and I can get this figured out ASAP. But in the meantime I’m here at work, anxious, and I’m feeling sleepy again. My husband laughed a little when I mentioned I was scared I might be narcoleptic, but I think he just doesn’t understand what I’ve been going though. He thinks it’s just the celexa and all I need is a new antidepressant. I hope it is that, because it would fix the problem much quicker!

Has anyone experienced similar symptoms? How do you deal? I’m worried like crazy.

2

IANAD, see your doctor, blah blah blah. The symptoms you describe sound like what I get when one of my blood levels is off – thyroid, Iron or B12. You may want to have a bunch of blood tests run to rule out those issues before the sleep test. Put it this way, I was back in the mode that you describe – not wanting to have sex (or, more specifically in my life, WANTING to, just not being awake enough to) because I’d rather sleep, feeling foggy all day, wanting to sleep all the time, etc – and got my bloodwork done. Turns out my anemia is getting a bit worse, and my B12 is low enough that I have to retest next month and if it’s not within normal ranges, start injections :eek:

If you were my friend IRL and listened to my whole lecture about seeing your doctor immediately anyfrigginway, I would suggest starting a daily regimen of B12 sublinguals and see if that helps. No joke, since I have started taking my B12, I can’t stand to touch the quad espresso I was drinking daily because it has me bouncing off the walls. I had one Wednesday and no joke, I was shaking when the caffiene kicked in – like that scene in Over the Hedge, when they give the squirrel the caffiene and all other action completely stops, and the squirrel is just walking around normally, but he’s really flying faster than the speed of light – yeh, that’s how caffiene is for me with B12 in my system. Just so you know.

3

I have a friend with narcolepsy. She has learned to deal with it very well. She has gotten to the point where she can feel an attack coming on and politely explains that it’s time for her to go. She has enough time to drive back to her house and have the attack in the comfort of her home. I’m not sure why you are afraid to find out your are narcoleptic, because it seems, at least for my friend, to be a fairly easy thing to treat and to work around.

I’ve had sleep disturbances most of my life, predominantly because of severe anxiety. I have had insomnia, nightmares and sleep paralysis on and off for… ever. It really came to a head a few months ago when I started to have weird fainting spells and fall asleep unexpectedly… one totally bizarre day I woke up and wasn’t even really sure that I was even awake for at least 20 minutes. I felt like sleep was threatening to pull me in at any moment, even when I was walking around. And at one point I went four days without more than maybe 7 hours of sleep-- it was utterly miserable, and I spent the final day afraid that I was going to start hallucinating or end up dying from sleep deprivation.

My doctor was not terribly concerned… she just said, ‘‘For some reason you aren’t getting enough REM sleep.’’ She prescribed Beck’s Feeling Good Handbook. I was pissed, but anxiety is really all it was. As soon as the major life transition was over, the symptoms lessened. I’m bitter every time my doctors prove me wrong, but the events in our lives and our psychological states have way more impact over our health than one might think. Eventually it went away. Maybe some day it will come back again.

Being tired IS a key symptom of major depressive disorder. I don’t know what sort of background you have but the way psychological disorders manifest themselves can be very much rooted in culture. In parts of Asia, for example, depression and anxiety hide behind symptoms like fatigue, stomachache, headache, etc.

I’m not really implying your tiredness is caused by the depression, just saying I wouldn’t rule it out. The mind has all sorts of fascinating ways to mess with people. You have done the right thing by contacting a doctor.

Mostly these things do come and go, to varying degrees of severity, but you are wise to see a doctor to make sure it’s nothing more serious. Good luck.

4

My experience with myself, spouse, and two kids, is that overall any sleep medecines are going to backfire. Either they are hard to get off of, or don’t work, or just disrupt your pattern further, but keep seeming worth just enough to make you afraid to stop them.

5

Yeah, I’m always afraid of that.

At this point I don’t need a sleep-aid so much as an awake-aid. I go to sleep immediately upon getting in bed, I have really vivid “adventurous” dreams and I just can’t wake up in the morning. I go through my day just waiting for the next time I can sleep. It’s sucking all my energy and will to do stuff.

I wonder if it is something with vitamins or my thyroid. I’ve had my thyroid levels checked before and it’s always WNL. But my sister and my cousin have Hashimoto’s so I’m always on the lookout for possible changes.

I’m hoping for a thyroid issue at this point, versus either A) a neurological condition; or B) doing all sorts of tests and finding out nothing is wrong. That would be the worst.

6

My husband just did a sleep study for sleep apnea. No results yet. He, too, has been sleepy most of his life.

The sleep disorder doc told him that some people develop sleep apnea as they age. Weight gain and soft tissue sagging contribute.

However, he also mentioned a genetic form* that runs in families. Hubby’s mom also has a problem. She uses a C-pap machine at night. I expect Hubby will be fitted for one soon.
*Not to be confused with Ondine curse

7

I was diagnosed with EDS/Narcolepsy following a sleep study on my 39th birthday. It took a while to get the medicational dosage right, but currently I’m on a drug called Provigil that works well. It’s not a “miracle worker” drug and I’m not bouncing off the wall (I was briefly when I was on Adderall, but it has too many side effects), but so long as I get 8 hours or so of sleep I don’t wake up exhausted. It’s the oddest thing in the world to actually wake up before the alarm clock goes off somedays like “normal” people do, or to hit the snooze alarm just once or twice and then actually get up. (For perspective, for a time I had as many as- no exaggeration- five (5) alarm devices and could sleep through all of them, and if I went to bed on the night before an off-day and didn’t set an alarm it wasn’t unusual for me to sleep 14 hours.)

8

:smack:

Thought it said sheep disorders

9

From your description, it sounds more like you have severe sleep apnea than narcolepsy. My understanding of narcolepsy is that a person who is untreated cannot prevent themselves from falling asleep, whereas you are able to do so. (Albeit with great strain to your system.)
I developed sleep apnea after rapidly gaining almost 100 pounds because of a bout of severe depression in my 20s. The symptoms were much as you describe, though if anything, you sound worse off than I was. Try and find out the following:

  • Do these exhaustion issues seem to corresond to weight gain? (Although thin people can have sleep apnea too, obesity is a major factor.)
  • Do you snore when you sleep? Loudly? (Ask your husband)
  • Do you ever wake up gasping for air, with your heart pounding? (Ask hubby about this; you may do it but not be conscious of it)
  • Do you sleep on your back or stomach?
  • Do you wake up or get up frequently (more than once) during the night? Check with your husband on this too. You may not be entirely conscious when you do it.

Getting tested is the right thing to do, and if you get proper treatment you will feel a LOT better. But in the meantime, try to sleep on your side. Wedge a pillow against your back or even sleep on a couch if necessary.

I wish you good luck as well.

10

[Drowsy falling over narcoleptic hat on]

Actually narcolepsy is (in addition to not being a term recognized by SDMB’s spell checker, though narcoleptic is) an umbrella term. I thought it meant “falling asleep uncontrollably” as well until I was diagnosed with it, but that’s a particular form of narcolepsy known as cataplexy (i.e. technically the guy in Moulin Rouge was the Cataplectic Argentinian).
While cataplexy is the most severe form of narcolepsy, it is also the easiest to diagnose (for when you fall asleep while sitting at your desk or driving the school bus* people tend to notice). The main symptom of the lesser kind is Excessive Daytime Sleepiness (EDS) though its diagnosis is confirmed by a sleep study. When I had mine it was noticed that unlike most people I pretty much fall straight into REM sleep (i.e. I start dancing like Michael Stipe in Losing My Religion) and remain there for much of the night. While it sounds like this would be more restful (REM sleep is the deepest kind) it’s less restful as it makes it damned near impossible to wake up. This is why sleep paralysis is common among narcoleptics (including me)**; you’re aware of what’s going on around you but you can’t move or react to it because a part of your brain is not just drowsy or snoozing but still asleep. (There’s a more complicated explanation than that, but that’s the jist.)

Most narcoleptics of the non cataplectic variety are not diagnosed until they’re middle aged or over, for most don’t realize there’s a neurological problem causing their sleepiness. Human sleep (and, just as important, waking) patterns are controlled by what’s known as the Circadian Clock Protein (CCP) and a deficit in this or an inability to catalyze screws up the body’s ability to regulate sleep. As mentioned, one of my biggest problems before being diagnosed and medicated was a near inability to wake up in the morning that for more than 20 years of my adult life I put down to a lack of willpower.

*My friend “Earl”, who I’ve mentioned on these boards, grew up in a tiny town I’ll call Lizette, Alabama (the real name is far more country) where his shop teacher was also his bus driver, an old black man called Cuzz who was beloved by his students but had a little problem- he was cataplectic and would occasionally (not daily, just once in a while) suddenly drift off to sleep while driving the schoolbus. The boys of that bus route would take shifts doing “Cuzz Duty”, meaning one would sit up front and rouse Cuzz if he nodded off. It was years before one of them thought to alert their parents of this as they just assumed his little problem was known about, and this being Lizette, Alabama it wasn’t like there was a lot of traffic to contend with; when parents did find out (which wasn’t due to an accident- Cuzz never had one) the kids felt horrible because it cost him his bus driving job, but not his drivers’ license and not his shop job. (The fact that Cuzz was missing fingertips may have been a clue but was literally put down to the fact that “he’s a shop teacher, a lot of 'em don’t have a full set of fingers”.)

**Though it was never diagnosed, I am near 100% positive that my maternal grandmother had narcolepsy and to some extent cataplexy. She once caused a bit of a small town scandal by falling asleep and snoring at a relative’s funeral (people accused her of doing it deliberately) and once dropped her infant son when she fell asleep while nursing him. Most serious perhaps was whens he burned herself on a stove when she fell asleep while cooking (though not too severely as she woke up pretty quickly when the stove eye touched her skin, but enough to have to be bandaged).
Sleep paralysis was her biggest problem, however. Like a lot of southern women in the days before air conditioning she used to take a bath and a nap on hot afternoons, and my mother (the only child still at home) told of coming home several times to find her mother lying on a sofa or in the tub with her eyes open but sound asleep and seemingly incapable of any type of response until she was shaken awake. Even at the time it was known this was not normal, but as my grandmother was also an insulin dependent diabetic it was attributed to that. When my mother married (she was 16 years old and my grandfather was gone 5 days per week due to his railroad job) she made arrangements for neighbors and the maid to always check the house in the afternoon to make sure that her mother was “functional”.
As my grandmother was also an insulin dependent diabetic, her “sleeping spells” were attributed to that disorder even though there’s really no relation. (These weren’t diabetic comas- she would have the spells when her blood sugar was fine.) I’m almost 100% sure it was narcolepsy, a disorder that I have and that one of my cousins has (though neither of us are cat jaf ajlllllllllllll what bird said that? huh… oh… cataplectic.