Category Archives: depression

It’s All Going to Hell

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It has been  three months since my last post.  I have spent these months searching for medical help with my Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder. None of the so-called “sleep” doctors I’ve been to ever mentioned the possibility of DSPD.   In desperation, I just sent an email out to a neuropsychologist because the stress has affected my usually-easy-going temperament, and I don’t even like myself any more.

Also, during these few months, the family brought a rescue dog home.  He was smart, sweet, and cute, but he would not stop biting when playing.  He went back to the rescue.  So, last week, they brought home a cute, sweet, gentle rescue kitten, who is still sequestered in the upstairs bedrooms because their current prissy cat refuses to have any of it.

My plans, after the holidays, is to go the shelter and get a senior cat who just wants to snuggle. I need the companionship.  I need the touching.

I need to find a way out of his personal sleep hell. It has affected my digestion, because when I eat depends on when I sleep.  When should I take my meds?  I often don’t even know what day it is.  It’s making me crazy.

ADDENDUM:  My daughter just told me that when I got home from the store yesterday, I left my car running in the driveway.  It’s a good thing my grandson noticed the car’s lights were on.  I am definitely losing it, fast.

Hah. Another all nighter!

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After my all-nighter the other day, I just stayed up all the next day, fell asleep in my chair for a couple of hours in the afternoon. After taking some MMJ, I fell asleep about 4 am and slept for 15 hours. It doesn’t help that I had great dreams, filled with people and things to do. No wonder I don’t want to wake up.

It’s now about 2 am. I’m losing track of what day and night it is. I am either going crazy or I am dying. I don’t know which I prefer, since I have no reason to stay alert and alive, anyway.

I need a reason. I think I found one at the Thomas O’Connor Animal Shelter. A sweet looking 8 year old couch potato cat. I will make an effort to make that happen.

I also have to get the MMJ under some kind of control. If I take too little, I still don’t fall asleep. If I take to much, I don’t want to get out of bed and stay there all day. That, alone is going to drive me crazy.

Tomorrow, I will call the shelter. I have to find a reason to stay sane. And alive.

And I will look of a neuropsychologist who takes my insurance and does telehealth. It can’t get any worse. If it does, I’ll just refuse to ever get out of bed. It’s not worth it.

It’s going to be an all-nighter.

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It’s 3:30 am. By now I have usually taken my Remeron and also 35 mg of marijuana and am on the verge of sleep. Last night I did that, fell asleep about 4:30 am, and slept for 12 hours. Which means I got up in time for dinner. Their dinner was my breakfast. Enchiladas. That’s what I had for breakfast.

The truth is, I never know when I’m going to fall asleep even though I go through the same routine every night. I take my Remeron at 11:30 pm and take my marijuana edibles (THC/CBN) between 12 and 1 am, with the lights down low. I get ready for bed at 2 am and am in bed by 3 am.

But that doesn’t mean I will necessarily fall asleep right away. There are nights (days) I don’t fall asleep until 6 or 7 am. There are some mornings when I’m still awake while my son-in-law is up getting ready for work.

For a while, it was “asleep by 3:30 am and up by 12:30 pm.” And I could live with that. But as time goes on, my sleep schedule gets more and erratic, and I don’t know how I’m going to be able live with that.

And I am having a hard time productively using those night hours when I am awake. I guess, psychologically, for me, night time has always been for sleep. Or dancing. It’s like I’m on my old dancing schedule: I used to go out a 11 pm, dance until 2 am, and be asleep by 3 am. Sometimes, now, I actually put on music during those dark hours and dance. But it’s not the same. Nothing is the same. I am caught in this limbo of a non-life.

Since I have an overwhelming backlog of yarn, I started to crochet a sweater from what seemed like a simple pattern. Made continuously from the top, down. Half double crochet all the way, with some increases. What is making me crazy, is that every time I make the indicated increases and then go to check the number of stitches, I get a different number. It’s making me crazy at 3 am. So I ripped it all out and am starting again, and I’m still never getting the number of stitches I’m supposed to have. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Eating on this crazy schedule is also a problem. If I wake up around noon, no problem. I have “brunch.” And then dinner is around 5:30. By 10 pm, I’m hungry, so I have a snack. And around 1 am, I’m hungry again. So, maybe a banana and chocolate almond milk. What I need to do is stock up on some yogurt.

And when should I take my vitamins? If I take them with dinner, will they increase my energy at night so that sleep becomes even more difficult?

My isolation has become toxic. I don’t even see much of my family. We used to at least have dinner together, but the “dog experiment” messed with the old patterns. It was an “experiment” because, while we all loved the dog, who was very smart and was already learning to respond to commands, he was not able to be “cured” of biting. We know he just wanted to play, the way he might with other dogs. Except that he had not been around other dogs to get the message from them that biting them was not OK. It all got very complicated, and he had to be taken back to the Rescue folks.

So, the family will be looking at more middle aged dogs who tend to be couch potatoes. And, while they are looking, they are fencing in the yard, in anticipation of finding a dog that is a better fit for this family.

Meanwhile, here I sit, at 4:14 am, not sure what to do now, except to just stay up for the rest of the night and try to make it through the day.

I binged watched some stuff that is streaming: Evil, Midnight Mass, Chuck, and now I’m watching Why Women Kill. Maybe I’ll just watch more tv.

Maybe I’ll look on Pet Finder and see if I can find an older cat to keep me company. Their mean prissy “don’t touch me” cat can just suck it up. And if they finally find a dog, he will have to suck it up too. My comfort/happiness/ is just as important as theirs.

I just don’t know how I’m going to manage living like this.

So, here I am at 2 A.M……

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While I’m waiting for that “sleep switch” to kick in, I’ve been trying to track down other bloggers around my age to see if we can develop into a virtual community of kindred spirits. That’s what I had back in the 2000s, and I miss the virtual camaraderie.

As part of my efforts to lesson my feelings of isolation, I am working with my local senior center to try to put together a weekly Zoom group of older folks who are disabled or are self quarantined. I only go out when I have to — medical appointments or grocery shopping. I would love to make new friends, and these days, Zoom is the way to do it.

I did spend most of my afternoon sending out my poetry in response to several “call for entries.” I have been pretty successful getting my poetry published, but it is three years since I have sent any out. At some point I will add a “Poetry” link to my primary menu.

Beginning next week, I will be part of a Zoom-based poetry group. I just love when synchronicities kick in and I become aware of the ongoing spirals that my life is on. I dreamed of a married couple with whom I was close friends for decades, but then they moved away. I contacted to tell them about the dream, and they put me in touch with the leader of the poetry group. The leader of the poetry group was one of my ex-husband’s college students and my daughter was a flower girl at his wedding. Circles into spirals.

Obviously, I have my depression under control. If only I could do that about my Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder.

Three or four a.m. has become my usual bedtime. Will I ever be awake again during those morning hours when the air smells fresh and the birds are just starting to sing?

It’s Not Insomnia, It’s DSPS

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I don’t have insomnia, I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.

Over the past decade, I consulted with various sleep specialists, none of whom ever mentioned DSPS as a diagnosis. I finally had to diagnose myself. All of them told me that I, indeed, had a sleep disorder and provided various suggestions, all of which I tried and documented here. The last sleep study I endured, several months ago, required two Ambien to even get me to sleep on their schedule. Then they woke me up after 4 hours (5 am) because I had to leave, and I was barely able to walk out of the lab and find a place to sit and wait for my daughter to pick me up. I have found that few doctors do the investigations necessary to actually find an accurate diagnosis. It has become cookie-cutter medicine. One size fits most.

Three months ago, I had a serious emotional meltdown, which prompted me to find someone to prescribe more effective anti-depressants, since there would be days I would only get out of bed to eat and go to the bathroom. Struggling to change my circadian rhythm — and failing over and over — finally sent me on an internet search to see if my 3 or 4 am to noon or later sleep schedule was something others were experiencing. And they are. Many. All of the world. Almost all just learned to live with it because nothing worked when they tried to change it. One woman who lived on the east coast took a job on the west coast because she figured that would put her bedtime at midnight, and she could live with that. But it didn’t take long for her body to relapse back to a 3 am bedtime, even on the west coast.

This household shuts down around 11 pm each night. That leaves me with a good four hours to find something to do that won’t wake them up. It’s so easy to just sit, watch tv or read, and eat. I wish I could use that time to write poetry.

Anti-depressants, at the potency at which I am now consuming them, dull the sensibilities that I need to be inspired to create poetry. Even my prose becomes drab and spiritless. But now that I have a diagnosis and an actual official name for what I am experiencing, I will try to ease off some of what I began taking to climb out of the Major Depressive Disorder that I fell into because of all of my failed efforts to change my circadian rhythm.

What I wonder is, why now, since most folks with DSPS are adolescents or young adults. I think there’s a connection to the 5 year trauma I lived through taking care of my increasingly demented mother while dealing with the constant harassment and abuse heaped upon me by my brother. During that time I had no set sleep schedule and often had to resort to sleeping pills to get any rest at all. While enduring my recent meltdown, I realized that I really do have PTSD as a result. Knowing is always better than not knowing.

I’m back writing on this blog to fill up some of that time until 3 or 4 am, when my sleep switch activates. That’s really what it feels like. While I feel relaxed and tired during those wee morning hours, there comes a time when I simply fall asleep, as though a switch is flicked. There is nothing I can do to make that happen. When my brain is ready, it shuts off. And then I sleep deeply for 8 or 9 hours and wake up rested.

So, this is my life now, at age 81. It could be worse, and I try to be grateful that I can still see and hear (with help) and drive (but not at night) and I don’t have any serious medical conditions. I can live with that.

“to sleep, perchance to dream”

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Yes, that’s from Shakespeare.

Boy, am I doing a lot of sleeping and dreaming. As a matter of fact, my dreams are a hell of a lot more engaging than my life these days. It gets so I don’t want to get out of bed, because if I stay there and fall back to sleep, I will have more adventurous dreams that are more interesting than any of my daily doings.

My dream world has very specific landscapes that include a section that is some odd representation of the campus where I went to college; a distorted version of the part of the city where I worked for 20 years; a kind of Catskill Mountain vacation hotel where I once attended ballroom dance weekends; and a weird version of an apartment complex where I used to live. I am always trying to get somewhere among those places, but it’s usually a matter of “you can’t there from here”. On those excursions, however, I might meet up with friends, go dancing, play with cats, and come up with a good first line for a poem. But then I wake up, and it’s all gone where dreams go.

No matter how hard I try I can’t reclaim a normal sleep schedule. I often don’t fall asleep until early morning hours, and then I sleep until afternoon. My sleep got messed up more than a decade ago when I was taking care of my demented mother. A search of this blog for “caregiving” or “dementia” will unearth full details.

I have tried to get control of my insomnia (search “insomnia” if you are curious). Medical Marijuana worksto get me to fall asleep, but it is awfully expensive because it takes a double dose to have any effect on me.

There actually have been more than a couple of times when I didn’t get out of bed for more than 24 hours. To be honest, I there are times that I would just as soon not wake up. I kind of identify with a 1999 episode of Ally McBeal, in which “Ally’s favorite teacher from high school is dying, but she has a wonderful dream life which she would like to remain in. Ally decides to get a court order to force the hospital to put her into a coma.”

In my dreams, I have relationships, friends, hugs, interactions, adventures — kind of the opposite of life with Covid-19. (I do live with family, but that’s not the same as hanging out with peers.)

On the Late Show last night, Bill Gates suggested that it might be close to a couple of years before we can settle into some kind of normalcy. How are we all going to keep from going off the deep end before then? Will I even live long enough to see a “new normal.”

In the meanwhile, lacking motivation, energy, and inspiration, I continue to avoid my pile of half-done creative projects that are wasting away in the corner where I piled them months ago. And, also in the meanwhile, I have tracked down a former therapist and have started, again, trying to find my muse, looking for some fuse that will propel me out of this mindless funk.

Do Not Go Gentle

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Dylan Thomas wrote the poem that begins “Do not go gentle into that good night.” It’s very easy to fade away into old age, to pretend all is OK, to try not to be a burden, to keep our pain and sadness to ourselves. I guess it’s one thing if you are old and terrifically healthy and still run marathons and such. It’s another if your bones acknowledge the wear of every year — and that is the situation with most of us.

Most younger folks have no idea what they might be in for because we often try to accommodate to their expectations of us. Well, I say that we need to own — and own up — to whatever fragilities we have earned. Let the rest of the world become more aware of what the realities of aging are for most of us. Maybe then they would be more patient when we drive more slowly, or take longer at the check-out lines, or struggle with hearing loss.

I refuse to pretend that I don’t need help getting up and down stairs or getting out of a chair, or opening a jar of pickles. For sure, getting in and out of a car.

My family, with whom I live, understands my struggles because I don’t hide them. My reality is not very gentle: my gait isn’t always steady, my fingers don’t always hold sure, my rest isn’t always enough. And I think that is the reality for most of us, and it is a reality that most of those who are still young will one day face. They might as well see it coming.

So I believe in complaining — in the sense of being honest about what it is like, for most of us, to be old. We should be brutally honest, rather than gentle, about admitting — as Bette Davis supposedly admitted — “Old age is not for sissies.”

This is what I think about as I lay, sleepless at 3 a.m.

But I think of other things too — the projects I would like to do if I could find the energy and focus, for example. I am realizing that most of my life has required a great deal of both, and I have always had to move fast, decide quickly, shift gears while still in full-speed mode. I never had much patience for long-term planning (not a good thing); I’ve never had expectations of perfection (a good thing). But I always had the energy and focus to get done what had to be done.

Now, I spend an awful lot of time sitting in my rocker/recliner, staring into space, not thinking, or planning, or hoping. I spend an awful lot of time awake when I shouldn’t be and sleeping when I should be living.

Life with Covid-19 sucks, and it sucks even more if you are physically feeling your old age, isolated from your peers, and disconnected from outside stimulation. Yes, that’s how I feel, and I have to believe that I am not alone.

There was a time in the history of this weblog that talking to myself, here on these pages, got me through some rough times because there were folks out there eavesdropping with whom I eventually connected in a reaction of mutual support and camaraderie. That connection was the whole purpose of personal blogs, back then.

But it’s a different virtual world, now, and if all I do is talk to myself in these pages, that’s fine. I learn a lot about myself that way, and, although what I learn is not always pleasant, it’s enlightening.

“Too soon old; too late smart”.

Or as my Polish grandmother used to say “starość nie radość”.

Dream Addiction

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If I have strong enough marijuana to ingest, I can sleep, but I still don’t fall asleep until 3 a.m. If that stops working for a while, I revert to taking night time cold medicine — double dose. (I can’t drink alcohol because of my Reflux disease, and I can’t get a sleeping pill prescription because of my age.) My brain seems to ignore the effects of sedatives unless they are pretty potent. It makes me wonder if some synapses in my brain have become immune to sedatives.

When I do sleep, I dream — elaborate scenarios, filled with people I know and people I don’t. One of the people I don’t know is a guy. I never see his face, but he is obviously someone I am close to, emotionally and physically. He hugs me, holds me, whispers in my ear. Obviously, I am compensating for these things I no longer have.

I have been missing that kind of interaction for more than a couple of decades. That is how long I have been without a relationship with a man — more because of situation rather than choice. My situation has also taken me away from close women friends that I have had for more than 40 years. And Covid-19 makes it very hard to be optimistic..

So I have a much more enjoyable dream life than my awake life. And so I sleep. A lot. Yes, it’s an escape during these depressing times, and yes, I take an anti-depressant. There are days I sleep from 3 or 4 a.m. until my daughter wakes me for dinner the next day. I need to find a prescribing psychiatrist to determine if I should be taking something else and to help me figure out the rest.

For now, I am addicted to sleep and the dreams that come.

Years ago, I saw an episode of “Ally McBeal” that featured an old woman who is dying in a hospital and was put in an induced coma. When they woke her up, she insisted to be put back in the coma, where she lived a whole other life as a happy, young wife and mother. She was much happier in the coma, and she was dying anyway. I get it. I’d rather be sleeping and dreaming rather than experience the dreariness of what my daily personal life has become.

I used to be able to amuse and entertain myself creating stuff — sweaters, upcycled t-shirts, learning to paint and draw, cooking….. Not these days. I used to dance for exercise. Not any more with my escalating arthritis and torn rotator cuff that will never really heal. I used to go for short late afternoon walks. Instead, I now sleep.

Maybe the results of the coming election will lift some of my depression. But not all of it. I have to figure out how to get rid of the rest of it. I’m assuming the psychiatrist will help.

But in the meanwhile, my life will be what it is, and my dreams will be my escape.

It’s so frustrating that my sleep issue is one that so many elders experience. We create vehicles that explore outer space, but no one has figured out how to solve the problem of elder insomnia (which must be associated with how the brain ages). And neither has anyone figured out how to make a removable partial dental bridge that actually fits and works.

Dear Diary: I’m Adrift in Chaos

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All around me. All around my insides as well as my outsides.

I am used to being able to have some control over my life of 80 yeas. I get it that Covid 19 is in the driver’s seat right now. One of my “talents” has always been that I am able to find some pieces of myself to hang onto even in the midst of various forms of chaos; but I can’t seem to find any of those pieces.

As grateful as I am for the support and protection of my family, that all comes at a cost. And the cost is my sense of self at a time when very little is making sense at all. My reality has succumbed to the total chaos that rages all around me.

I am bummed that I don’t seem to be able to handle any of it. Mindfulness? Meditation? Forget it. Chaos rules my mind. I just want to sleep until I can wake to a better reality. And so I sleep. A lot.

I used to be able to gird my loins and launch myself into some creative craft project that would, at least, surround me with a brain buffer. I used to be able to take that chaos and re-purpose it into pretty decent poetry.

Is it so terribly hard now because I am old? Because I have used up my finite resources? I feel totally depleted. I don’t know who I am or why I am.

My late-diagnosed adult autistic son writes about trying to understand who he is in the context of his undiagnosed, fragmented journey.

My late once-husband, who tended to be single-minded, once told me that he wonders what is at my “core”; he saw me like an onion. The layers get pealed back and there’s nothing at the core. And this is how I saw him.

.House cactus.
You stand firm and fundamental
in your solitary nesting place
apart from your leafing, budding sill-mates.
You remind me of someone I know

So, I am an onion. Each layer is a period of my life that I created and lived and survived. My layers are what I am. Does that mean I have nothing at the core? Nothing solid, impermeable? Does it matter?

Maybe it does, if I find myself adrift in a chaos that is being absorbed by whatever is left of who I am. Do I even have another layer in me, or is that all there is?

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Dear Diary: Of Course

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Of course, I’m late again. Of course I’m still trying to get my crazy sleep schedule under control. Of course I’m eating too much chocolate. Of course I’m still experimenting with medical marijuana, which is the only thing that can get me to fall asleep. Last night, I put some alcohol tincture in a glass with V8 juice. It tastes like a Bloody Mary.

It still took at least an hour for me to fall asleep, so while I was lying there, I listened to one of my playlists on Spotify. It includes most of the songs I liked over the past 50 years. As I listened, I realized that I could put the songs in an order that reflected where I was in my life at the time each song was popular. I might try to do that at some point.

Listening to each song brought back very specific feelings, some of which I wish I could choose to forget. I have always tended to make choices based on what I wanted or needed. It’s not that I didn’t consider the wants and needs of others involved; but, ultimately I did what I wanted.

When I lie in bed at night, waiting for the THC to kick in, I let each song take me back, like the images in a photo album, to past places. When my mind reviews what my life was like each time, I feel regret. Regret about how little I understood myself and what little wisdom I had. Regret that I never learned how to “plan” — financially, physically, inter-personally. Regret that many of my choices negatively affected other people. Regret that I must have been very emotionally immature.

Throughout these 80 years I never set long-term goals, but rather I took advantage of opportunities (which worked out fine as far as my various careers, but not so fine in terms of my various relationships.)

It’s obvious to me, now, that the men with whom I chose to have a relationship were chosen because I knew they would not be around long. (The exception was my late ex-husband, but that’s a whole other story.) I knew, instinctively, how to get them to leave when I was ready to move on. In the meanwhile, each contributed, in his own way, to something I wanted or needed in my life. (Perhaps I also knew, instinctively, that there was no one man who could give me all I thought I needed; and now I see that I didn’t particularly care what they needed as well.)

From the perspective of decades, I am finally realizing several things: I am a bit of a narcissist; I am good at manipulating situations and people; I need people more than they need me; I like beginnings and endings and don’t do well keeping things going in the middle; I never knew who I really was. I’m not sure I even do now.