The fatigue cycle for me has gone on since I was 16 yrs old about a year before I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia and Chronic Pain at 17 and Endo at 27. When people say they are tired to me I usually just ignore them because the extent of tired I feel is no where measured to someone who does not live in Chronic pain or suffer from CFS. The best way it has been described is feeling like you have been run over by a Mac truck and to be honest it does as well as over and over and over again.
When I wake up I am groggy usually from whatever med has been prescribed for me to use. When I am not on meds I don't have the groggy feeling just more of the extreme exhaustion. I had a sleep test done in the 90's and was told I have Restless Leg Syndrome as well as I don't enter a REM sleep stage. It has gotten worse over the years especially when I am on certain medications when it gets really bad I want to cut off my legs. The one thing I have tried is wearing baseball socks, it seems to calm down the nerves to some degree to at least yet me sleep. A couple of meds that make the RLS worse that I have tried is Gravol, Lorazepam, Cymbalta, and any kind of pain med like Percocet and some times my Jaw muscle relaxant Flexeril.
I often think that I do many messed up things in my sleep. I often think of recording myself because I have done things in my sleep like, sleep walking, talking as well as even taking a cast off in my sleep and putting in the bathroom.
Throughout the day I am exhausted and all I think about is going home to bed, but like any mother that just can't be done. Dinner has to be made, homework done, and spending time with the family this makes it really difficult for someone with Chronic Fatigue because you start to get very irritable, short term memory loss, and emotional outbursts. When its finally time for me to go to bed around 9-10 I am wide awake... UGH. This cycle drives me crazy, and I usually can't fall asleep until like 1-2 am so at the end of the day I am barely getting 5 hrs sleep a night.
I went through 5 yrs of really bad insomnia when I was first diagnosed with Fibro. I could not sleep for the life of me. I would finally doze off at 5 am and have to be up at 6:30 to be at work for 7 am. I would not take those days back for anything. I was lacking so much sleep I became depressed and suicidal. During those years I was under a lot of stress with the job I my mind would not shut of at all. I would replay anything and everything that happened during the day and there was no way to stop it and all doctors wanted to do was push me Antidepressants.
I am lucky now that I don't have those thoughts but I have a very high stress job which I am barely able to cope with which makes all my conditions worse. Pain from Endo such as bowel, bladder and pelvic pain keep me up most nights as well as the nerves all over my body that seem to be inflamed on a daily basis. No position I sleep in is comfortable. I have tried a new bed, pillows etc and nothing. My circulation cuts off on every angle and that is where the struggle comes in when I am trying to just get to sleep. Not to mention when I finally get to that point my IC kicks in and I have to constantly get out of bed to pee and start over... Someone shoot me.
It is a week before Christmas and I am so done mentally, physically and emotionally. I feel like I am on the verge of a nervous breakdown and nothing I do is helping at all. I come home now to read or watch TV.
I was told that drinking wine is better than taking meds and for the most part I have done this but lately it is really messing up my sleep. I wake up every hour on the hour if I drink wine and that is just not working for me.
I am not sure how much longer I am going to be able to cope as I debate every single morning when I am forced to wake up to even bother going to work, but reality is that I have to, there is no other way around it. I don't work for a company that I can take short term disability to see if this helps because I will be shunned and treated like crap so its better for me to suffer and hide what I go through because I need my job.
All I want to do is sleep I am in a state of tired that I don't think I will ever ever get out of. I have absolutely no energy to do anything. The only people that really understand are the ones that experience this sort of Chronic Fatigue.
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