You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Sleep’ category.
One thing my ENT told me (and I have heard from others) is that a good night’s rest is important in dealing with tinnitus. Obviously it’s important for general wellbeing. I had a pretty good night’s sleep last night which is always great. I went to bed around 11 and work up only once around 4:40 am to use the restroom. Then slept solidly until around 7:30 am.
With the help of the fan, the ringing doesn’t normally bother me too much at night. Although I have had a few episodes where I awake in the middle of the night with the ringing in my ears at a very loud volume and it has sent me into a state of panic. Those ordeals tend to have a lasting effect on me leave me shaken up for several days. I’d like to say that those are behind me because the ringing is no longer a shocking surprise and I am learning how to calm myself.
I did a couple of things differently last night, one of which is to turn my air purifier up to medium instead of low. The other is that I didn’t use the pillow speaker. I do feel like the pillow speaker is detrimental in some ways. Though it stops me from having a loud wailing in the ear that is touching the pillow, yet it seems that when I do use it I seem to be a little worse off in the morning.
I always feel like the lower I can adjust the background noise, the better it is long term. I tried last night turning the fan on low but the ringing got louder than it had been in a while and I just decided last night wasn’t the night to try to push it. But I am pretty sure the road to recovery will involve gradually reducing my reliance on noisemakers.
The Ambien that I took last night did the trick of knocking me flat out. Unfortunately the sleep lasted for 3 hours and I woke up like a bolt of lightning had struck me in a mild panic. What is that about?!
I was totally wired and there is no way I would be sleeping so I took the remaining half of the pill. It did the trick again and I was out for another 3 hours, only to wake up again totally wired.
I would not describe the sleep from Ambien as restful at all. The only way I can describe it is that I was laying in bed feeling the usual insomnia and wondering if I would sleep. I started feeling a little woozy and then sat up only to discover that 3 hours had passed! It wasn’t like I had slept, though, it was more like somebody had just moved the clock ahead 3 hours. I felt just as awful, if not worse.
I am starting to have a rough time and feeling like there is something really wrong with me. I signed up for a site about Benzo addiction at http://www.benzo.org.uk/ and it is somewhat of a relief to know that my symptoms are fairly classic and as such, likely to go away when the Xanax gets out of my system. Still, the feelings are very real to me and I am scared and anxious almost all of the time.
I called my regular doctor again and told him the situation and pretty much begged him to prescribe me some type of sleeping pill since I don’t want Xanax. He gave me a 7 day prescription of Ambien. I did some reading on it and the potential side-effects are a little alarming. They involve people doing crazy things in their sleep like cooking, driving and getting arrested! I’m really most worried that I will just try to walk around on my hip without crutches. I will try one tonight and my wife has been instructed to stop me from doing anything crazy and make sure I’m not sleep walking. We’ll see how it goes…
Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and my ear ringing was freaking me out for some reason. I woke up and just felt an intense feeling of claustrophobia that I couldn’t shake. I felt like I needed to get this ringing out of my head and it wouldn’t go away.
I got up and walked to the bathroom and kinda paced around for a few minutes before I tried to go back to sleep. I turned on an air purifier that we had to create some white noise and that seemed to help. I went back to sleep but I woke up today feeling shaken up from the experience.
Eternal Beep 