Life is full, and that is a good thing, but it also distracts me from writing my blog, which I always intend to do, but never really get around to doing, mostly because I am too tired.
Update: Generally things have been going well. I have been back on my feet since the last weekend in November. The holidays were wonderful, we dealt with some winter illness in January and February was COLD, SNOWY and DREARY, as anyone who lives in the Northeast will attest too. I believe that they are saying it is the coldest February on record. And it was cold, too cold to play outside, too cold to walk the dog and even too cold to do the laundry. My washer freezes on a regular basis when the temperatures are too low for too long, which seemed to be about two thirds of the month of February this year. Ugh! I can say that March has been much warmer though, I have been able to do wash whenever I have needed to!
So there have been some tough moments, days, even weeks since my last entry. We had a scare with my husband at the end of January. He was having severe headaches and we thought maybe he had an aneurysm. We endured a very stressful trip to the emergency room where the doctors and nurses had us believing he was going to be rushed off for brain surgery, until the results of his tests came back and we found out that he just had a bad sinus infection. Whew! It took us a couple of weeks to get the headaches under control with the right medication. Thankfully he is just fine now. But, while we were dealing with the headaches with him, my daughter had the flu with a fever for five days and she missed four days of school while my son had an ear infection. That was a LONG two weeks. I think I survived on adrenaline alone, because nobody was sleeping and I was taking care of all three of them. As soon as everyone was showing improvement, this Mama was a cranky mess for a few days.
My last cycle was really tough on me mood wise. I had a few of those kinds of days that make me feel like the depression is starting all over again, and all I want to do is be left alone so I can sleep. but as always, sleep eludes me.
One of the biggest reasons I was so upset that insurance forced me off the medication that worked the best for me (Cymbalta), is because it was the one medication that did not make my problem dreaming worse. After being off it and trying other medications, nothing else worked quite right. Now I have been back on it since the early fall and I feel better overall than I have on anything else, but it is making the dreaming worse this time around. I am at the point in my life where I feel there really is no solution to my dreaming problem.
I have always been a dreamer. I don't know what most people dream about, but my dreams only sometimes contain people and places that I know. I am more likely to be a character in a movie with a really confusing and drawn out plot. I have had dreams like that ever since I can remember. I have many stories in my head that need to be written down as a result of some of these dreams. The one component that my depression has added to my dreaming is an emotional component. We all have occasional dreams that are upsetting, but I find it happening on almost a nightly basis lately. And the dreams are exhausting. I wake up feeling like I have just run a marathon. I have just lived this other life out in great detail, and now am expected to get up, fully refreshed and go about my own life during the day. Except I never feel refreshed. The best sleep I get during a 24 hour period are the twenty minutes I am lucky enough to doze off while my son is watching tv before we go to pick my daughter up from school.
I guess they call this kind of dreaming Lucid Dreaming and I can't find any way to make it stop. My doctor and I have discussed this at length and apparently I just seem to be one of those people who rarely, if ever, gets into a deep sleep. I can shake off the dreams, but I am never able to really shake off the tired feeling. I think this is why I have such a hard time getting up in the morning. When the dreaming gets worse during the PMS part of my cycle, sometimes I ask myself what is the point of going to bed at all. Sleep Aids will help me to fall asleep, and sometimes to sleep a little better during part of the night, but it is the crazy dreams towards the mornings that I find most challenging to endure. Lately I have been waking up feeling really down, and last night felt that way at bedtime too. It is a struggle, a minor struggle compared to being the throes of a bad depression, but it is still as struggle.
Sometimes my dreams will be tied to real life. I often dream of my former best friend. When life priorities changed, our relationship started to change. I was married, then with one baby, then another baby while she remained single. Then as the depression took a good hold of me, our friendship fell apart and she decided to end it. I still miss her all the time, but try not to think about. I will get heart twinges when I see the kids playing with something that she gave them, or they want to read one of awesome books she found for them. I still stop and have to remind myself that I can't share things with her anymore. But I try not to think about her for too long, I have laid the issue to rest. Then I have a dream about her where we are reconciling and going on some adventure, or I dream that we are having some kind of argument, and either way I wake up thinking about her and missing her, and just generally feeling bad because the dreams are so emotional and they feel so real. It is very frustrating to not be able to control what goes on in your head while you are sleeping.
It leaves me with facing a decision about when and how and if I should go off my medication. I don't think that it is time right now, but maybe soon...I don't know. I know that going off is not going to solve my depression and it definitely won't make me stop dreaming, nothing is going to that. My dreams, my depression are all part of who I am and I have to continuously figure out ways to cope with them, and ways to get better sleep whenever I can. And the issues that the dreams bring up, you know, those issues that I thought that I have dealt with, but apparently parts of my brain don't agree, well, I guess I will have to figure out ways to cope with them too.
Dreams and hormones, hormones and dreams will always be around to frustrate me.
