Exhaustion

It started a couple months ago. I had a bout of insomnia where I sat awake until about 6 in the morning. I drifted off into an unsatisfactory slumber for a couple of hours before waking up again. I dragged my way through that day mostly in a stupor.

Physiologically I don’t know what happened to me. But I wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep for several weeks afterwards.

Most of the time I would have a hard time falling asleep at night, then get a few hours of unproductive sleep before getting up and feeling tired all day. At all times, I wanted to take a nap. The funny thing about that is when I could nap, I again couldn’t fall asleep. Granted, just laying there was a lot more enjoyable than walking around wanting to just lay there. But I never felt rested.

Eventually I stopped doing things I enjoyed. I couldn’t hike more than 20 minutes before exhaustion set in. I stopped working out. I felt beat and out of breath all the time.

I was able to remain functional in the important things: eating, working, and cleaning myself. But the quality and motivation for everything was lacking.

Every day became a painful mixture of exhaustion, headaches, weakness and confusion. Even if I did sleep for 8, 9, or 10 hours I still woke up feeling like a slug that had just been covered in salt. Obviously I wasn’t going to get better on my own so I broke down and went to the doctor.

“Well obviously you’re suffering from symptoms of sleep deprivation,” he told me after I described my symptoms.

Blood tests showed nothing other than I’m really normal. I slept with a blood-oxygen detector to see if I have sleep apnea (I don’t). So the doc’s theory was that my sleep patterns and bio-rhythms were so out of whack that we just needed to reset them.

He gave me a prescription for a medicine that has a side effect of extreme drowsiness. It works. I take one at the same time before bed and I’m out. After about a week I started feeling fully rested after a night’s sleep. Now I am tired by midnight and sleep restfully. I feel human again.

A couple months of inactivity did wreak havoc on my fitness levels but those should come back. It just sucks spending a good part of the hiking season getting back into shape.

Anyway, now I can spend a little more time keeping up with things here rather than lying around lamenting that I don’t have the energy to spend 10 minutes on the computer.