Second.
And after you get some sleep, see a doctor. There are lots of good meds for insomnia. I’m up this early on purpose, because I took a melatonin and 5mg of Ambien last night to reset my sleep schedule, because I need to be awake and alert at 5am the next few days.
ETA: I’ve had 7.5hrs sleep, and should get 8+ tomorrow night.
Call the next person on the list, or turn the wheel over to someone else when you get to the pickup. You must let someone else drive your car. I would make you let me drive if I knew you were this severely deprived. I hope someone in your group does the same.
The only reason I’m up is because I haven’t been to bed yet. It’s still not past my bedtime. I get up between 12-1pm. And yeah, when I have to get up early I toss and turn all night, trying to sleep before my bedtime and being anxious about oversleeping. Because the only reason I would get up early would be to make an appointment/meeting I absolutely couldn’t get scheduled in the afternoon. Very rare indeed.
Yeah, Jesus man, even I’m not that bad.
SeaDragonTattoo is not kidding. You are the equivalent of rip-roaring drunk, and are putting your passengers, and other people on the road at risk.
It isn’t possible that you are absolutely indispensable at work, because people really do get sick, and if I were in your carpool, and you showed up to drive after 8 hours sleep in three days, I’d actually be pretty pissed at you-- not for not sleeping, but for trying to drive like that. I would be happy to take your place, and if you feel guilty, give me a few dollars for gas money.
Call in sick, then really do see a doctor, because insomnia like that has a cause. It could be hyperthyroidism, it could be apnea, it could be psychological, or it could be idiopathic (I have idiopathic insomnia); however, there are solutions.
I’m just really hoping for his safety at this point. Stay safe, man.
I texted my car pool guy to go ahead. I just got another hour and a half sleep and am getting up now.
I can’t be off today.
Sorry for the hijack Johnny.
But… But I started it!
That’s it exactly.
I don’t have insomnia. I fall asleep very quickly. I can go back to sleep quickly. But I used to sleep through the night every night. Now I wake up at least once sometimes 2-3 times every single night. It’s annoying the crap out of me.
Back when I was married and my youngest was in kindergarten (my ex was going to school full time and left early) this was my schedule:
Come home from work at 3:00am.
Try to get to sleep right away, hopefully by 4.
Wake up before 7 to get the kids off to school.
At 9am try to get back to sleep.
At 1130 be ready for the little one to come home from half day kindergarten.
Be waiting in the driveway at 2:35pm for my stepson to take over watching his sister so I could be on time for work at 3:30.
Rinse, repeat.
Sometimes the ride home was like I was on LSD. One time I parked in front of my kid’s school and got out of the car and didn’t wake up until I was almost to the door. Schools don’t tend to be open at 3am.
But according to my ex I never did anything to help.
Tuesday I finally did feel I could drop off to sleep very easily. Unfortunately it was 6:30 and I was on the freeway.
Sometimes I wish I could set the GPS and the cruise control and take a nap while the car finds the way.
I am totally indispensable at work for the next two weeks as I’m leading an audit team.
I know what’s causing my insomnia; it’s called divorce. My financial situation is terrible right now because of all of this, and I just got hit with a $2,000 bill that I have no way of affording at the moment and have no idea what I’m going to do.
I was kidding. It just seemed odd for you to pop in and suddenly start bragging about how much sleep you get.
That’s still a type of insomnia. I’ve read every book that sleep psychologists and GPs recommend on sleep, as well as a few written *for *doctors.
Ask your doctor for something like Ambien. (This is for the OP too.) Explain the stress, the long drive, and the fact that for two weeks, you would need to be in intensive care before you could call in sick. You doctor can give you an Rx for 14 of them, with no refills. If you want, you can break them in half, and take a 3mg melatonin along with it. They aren’t addicting, but some people abuse them as recreational drugs, and people who do that-- take them, and then try to stay up to enjoy a “high” build up a tolerance, so they won’t work as a sleeping pill. You need to take them, and the go to bed. Ideally, you get in bed, take it, put the glass on your nightstand, and lie down. You don’t take it and then go to pee and brush your teeth, take out the dog, and lock the doors. It’s the very last thing you do before your head hits the pillow.
Ambien is “addicting” only in the sense that insulin is. Some people who have coped with severe insomnia cannot sleep without it, but it’s not because a doctor gave them a two week Rx, they slept like a baby, and then couldn’t sleep when they ran out of it. They couldn’t sleep because they went back to their normal state of insomnia. Some people who ABUSE it may exhibit odd day time behavior when they try to quit, but so may people who quit pot, and pot isn’t physically addicting-- it can still create a psychological dependence, and the key concept is that the person was abusing it. People can abuse vitamin C and get “reverse scurvy” when they try to quit.
If you wake up and you don’t need to be up yet, but you can still get 3.5 hours of sleep, it’s OK to take another 2.5mg (1/4 of the standard 10mg dose, or 1/2 of the 5mg that you can get if you ask the doctor for it).
If it’s possible, you might want to start getting up earlier and going to bed earlier every day-- I know it’s not possible if you have kids. But if there’s one day you have to be extra early, you still might need to get up within an hour of the time you need to get up for your early day every day.
27 years of coping with severe insomnia talking. Ambien for me was like Prozac for people with clinical depression, although I don’t take it every day not (just when I have to shift my sleep schedule, or I had to be up late one night, for example, because my son was sick, and need it to get back to sleep at my regular time the next night). I have another medicine I take on a regular basis that helps. It’s an anti-seizure medicine that I take a very low dose of (it wouldn’t prevent seizures if I had them) once a day, around 4pm, and then I take 3 to 5mg (depending on how early it gets dark) about a half and hour before I need to go to bed. This is after a lot lot of experimenting, and interpreting the results of a sleep study.
When I was having lots of problems, and sometimes getting 14 hours sleep over 3 nights, and then for two weeks had to make a long drive every morning, and had a situation with my husband’s work schedule, and the fact that we had only one car, I caused a pretty bad accident. Worst injury was a sprained ankle, but two cars were totaled. I wasn’t impaired in any way other than lack of sleep, and I was doing everything-- coffee, sounds on the radio, A/C on high-- to stay awake.
I drop off very quickly when I go to bed. But when I have to get up early, if I wake up in the middle of the night it’s very hard to go back to sleep.
I’ll take your word for it. I don’t think it’s a big deal. I’m losing maybe 15 minutes a night at the most. It is just annoying.