Just wanted to clarify one thing: my sleepless nights are not entirely Marco’s fault. I mean, they are and they aren’t. I have had trouble sleeping since I was a baby. My entire life has been spent getting just enough sleep (usually between 4 or 5 hours per night, sometimes more, sometimes less); enough to get through my work/school day. I lie awake hours on end, no matter how exhausted I feel. Part of it is my thought process. I do some of my best thinking in the late hours, and unfortunately have no ‘Off’ switch. I have tried yoga, warm milk, baths, showers, herbal remedies, and every over-the-counter sleep drug offered. Reading is of no help, as it is my favorite activity in the world, and more likely to keep me awake; I’ll want to stay up to finish my book. Nothing seems to help.

Further, it is made even harder by the fact that I am highly sensitive to noise. Snoring, heavy breathing, dogs pacing, cats bathing, birds chirping…its all too much for me. The slightest noise will wake me up. About 10 years ago I discovered the joy of a fan. A Weatherworks box fan, to be precise. Its lovely. The ‘low’ setting has just enough white noise to cover all the minor annoyances at night that would otherwise torture me. This has helped some of the quality of sleep that I do get, just not the quantity.

Last year, I finally decided to talk to my doctor about it and get some real help. He prescribed a few different things for me to try. One, Rozerem, was not covered by our PPO (which I thought was the point of having the most expensive plan?!) and would have cost me $100 per month to use. Another made me sick, and the third simply did not work. He then prescribed Ambien. I hate to say this about any drug, but OMG, it was love. It relaxed my body AND my mind. I could wake up if I needed to pee or let Chloe outside, and had the luxury of being able to fall back to sleep with no trouble afterward.  During the 10 or 11 months that I was using it, I never slept less than 7 hours per night, I was on a regular night schedule (11pm bedtime) and damn it if I wasn’t happy as a clam!

Things were going along nicely until I discovered I was pregnant last September. I stopped taking the Ambien immediately. I knew that the first trimester was a critical time for the baby’s development, and didn’t want to risk it, though all my research showed that it was considered safe for use during pregnancy. Its not highly recommended, however does not show any side effects. The fact that I was also on an extremely low dosage would work in my favor later on, I thought. Sleeping wasn’t terrible for the first few months, but right around November things started to sour. It got harder to sleep, partly due to the fact that I had to wake up to pee more often than usual. Then, it became difficult to fall asleep. Now, it is simply impossible until I have completely exhausted every single particle in my body. In the past 2 1/2 weeks, I have not gotten more than 5 hours of sleep per night. I am awake so late that its actually really early. Not only am I completely exhausted from the lack of sleep, but I am also growing a human being inside of me, and am naturally quite tired from all the work.

Yesterday, I saw one of the doctors at my OB-GYN. I normally see Sue, my NP CNM, but as you never know who will be on call when I deliver, I have to see the other 2 doctors in the practice to get comfortable. I’d never met her before, and that already made it difficult. I tried explaining my problem to her, but she just recommended meditation. I don’t think she understood that this wasn’t a new problem for me, that I’d been suffering with it my entire life. She said “You’re young, this is a cycle you can probably break.” I thought I was making myself clear that it was NOT a new development, and that I know meditation is not for me. Even during the time I took yoga, the hardest part was trying to clear my head during the relaxing poses. I could get into (or attempt) any pose you wanted, but ask me to free up my mind and I was stuck. I wanted to cry in my doctor’s office, but I held back because she was a stranger, and instead pretended to think over what she was saying.

I can’t go on like this! I know that my lack of rest can’t be good for Marco. Its not good for my state of mind. I want to talk to my regular practitioner about it; he prescribed me the Ambien and would be the one to prescribe it again if I needed it. If he wants to discuss it with my OB-GYN then I am all for that, as long as they understand that they can’t sit back and do NOTHING. I am already going to lose hours of sleep once I have this baby, and it makes sense that I want to be well-rested the last few months of pregnancy, doesn’t it?