Day: December 16, 2017

The “stay awake your life depends on it” switch from earlier reminded me of one medication I was on years ago that I would just as soon forget.

(Though I don’t clearly recall which exact one it was now. It’s been long enough, and there were enough different ones for a while which just did not work out in quite a variety of extremely unpleasant ways. I definitely remember the experience, though.)

Anyway, that stuff dragged me out almost as bad as the earlier one that had me sleeping 20 hours a day toward the end. Only my body had gotten more experience at keeping itself awake.

What’s one very effective way of accomplishing that? Seemingly random adrenaline surges! What has my system always been extra super good at anyway? Right. 😱

That was a fun couple of months until I finally figured out what might be causing all the sudden debilitating supercharged “anxiety” attacks with no obvious triggers. Didn’t even know that the dysautonomia crap was a real and highly relevant thing then, but it did finally dawn on me that it might have something to do with trying to stay awake and anything that could barely pass for functional. (In my defense, I was thinking worse the longer all of that went on. And no wonder.) And it did stop once that stuff was out of my system.

Thankfully, I haven’t been on anything since then which caused anywhere near the level of constant grogginess. Back then I was also already dealing with unrecognized celiac and probably-EDS related fatigue, though the number of things contributing and the baseline level have gone way way up since then with my health crashing.

But yeah, over the years my system has needed to learn some not always pleasant tricks for pushing through some serious fatigue and exhaustion. And it can be hard to figure out when you really do need sleep when that’s a constant background thing, much less try to get the not usually even conscious coping stuff cranked down enough to let sleep happen once you do realize it’s really needed.