Slippery Slope

Thanks to a tablet, I slept like a log last night. I took the tablet at 10pm while still downstairs and it knocked me out in about 10 minutes. I woke briefly around 11pm and managed to stagger into bed and the next thing I knew it was 7am. Lovely, it's been a while since I had such a restful night.

However, I do not want to take these tablets on a regular basis as they have some pretty nasty side effects with continued use. So this evening I was in bed at 10.30, with some melatonin. You can guess from the time that this blog entry was posted, what happened. I couldn't get to sleep properly. I slithered around on the edge of sleep for a while. I guess that I almost made it but alas fell into a nightmare instead, one that is probably worth mentioning: it seemed that my sister-in-law was pregnant (Yes, Isa!) but caught some kind of bug that meant that she needed a blood transfusion. My brother was on the phone with me as he discovered this and he got very upset and I couldn't understand why until he said that if she had a blood transfusion she would lose the baby. 

I 'woke' up at that point, heart pounding and full of stress. It was 12:15am, ie past my midnight threshold, so I thought "to hell with it" and took another full sleeping tablet. It's now 1:30am and this time the damned thing has seemingly had no effect. I lay in bed for an hour waiting for it to cut in but have now given up.

I have to admit that I'm getting very scared by my inability to sleep. Or rather, the thing that scares me is lying in bed in the dark with my heart thumping in my chest, full of stress and unable to relax. What this kind of stress is doing to my body I dread to think. I cycled to work a couple of times last week to try and combat the effects. The strange thing is that I don't seem to suffer from it during the day, only when I'm trying to sleep or when I wake up in the middle of the night. In fact, I've had a relatively quiet day today, just working on Nattie's railway board, cleaning up the garage and enjoying the fine weather. It's only at night the that demons come out to play.

I have to find a solution to this problem as soon as possible. I'm afraid of the consequences for my health and also it makes work that much more difficult, just the extra mental effort it takes to push through a working day after a bad night is hard enough, never mind the mental fog and disorientation that results.

Well, I'll drink a cup of green tea and sit here and hope for sleep. The pounding in my chest has eased somewhat - the effect of writing for the blog? - so maybe I'll get off soon.