life's new lease?

As puzzling and crazy-making the past 10 years of insomnia have been, its relinquishment over the past two months, starting nearly to the day that I broke my hip, has been nothing short of astounding.  So for as much as I've whined and moaned about my sleep problems with my highly sporadic posts, I'd be remiss not to note its lifting, and add a couple of comments and conjectures as to what I think might be going on.

First off, because visuals speak louder than words, I'll unveil a graph that tells part of the story.  I started keeping regular track of my sleep hours every night since January 2012 (I wish I had been doing this through the whole period since the nightmare started in 2003).  The red line is a 30 day moving average of sleep hours per night.  For those of you not familiar with moving averages, to get the sleep hour data point for any given day (say, June 1), I take the average sleep hours of the previous 30 days (The period of May 1 to June 2.  For the next day, June 2, take the average sleep hours per night from May 2 to June 2, and so on.)

I am lousy at formatting, so while it may not be pretty or slick, this will have to suffice.  I fractured my hip on August 31st 2013.  Though I am mostly back on my feet right now and have resumed most activities, I am still sleeping relatively well compared to before the fracture.

Those looking closer at the graph may notice that the trend line starts heading up a bit before the fracture.  For August 16 - August 30th, I averaged 6.5 hours per night, which is way better than all the previous graphed periods, so maybe the fracture had nothing to do with it.

So here is my alternative hypothesis:  Sometime this summer I slightly altered my supplement routine - I started taking right before bed 50gm of 5-HTP and ashwaganda.  I also exhausted my stash of cheap melatonin supplements and started buying better quality brands.  So I now take 3mg of time release melatonin right before bed as well, and when I inevitably wake up (usually around 2 - 4 AM), I take 3 non-time release.  Sometimes I will supplement with additional 1MG melatonin pills as well.  Sometimes I need to meditate for 30 min to an hour to get back to sleep as well.

I pretty sure that I am utterly dependent on both 5-HTP and melatonin now, but I will choose dependency over the semi-conscious living hell of insomnia.  I'm hoping that this, in combination with my regular habits of heavy exercise and mediation, will enable me to mostly shake this bugaboo.  Fingers crossed.  The 5-HTP is tricky for me.  50mg is a low dose, but it makes me prone to having seizures and gives my odd feelings of disconcerting physiological discomfort throughout the day.  More than 50mg, the problem with seizures and auras gets worse.  I'm sure my serotonin production/regulation system is totally whacked.

I occasionally (once every week or two) use and need pharmaceutical backstopping.  From current and leftover prescriptions, I now have restoril (which I've habituated to after over 2 years of sporadic use), ativan, and lunesta (which made me depressed and gave me wicked rebound insomnia when my prescription was active) to choose from.  From my hip fracture prescriptions, I have a few leftover diazepam and vicodin, which also tend to knock me out.  From here on out, I'm hoping that I can stay on an even keel, with only having to resort to the meds 1x every 3 weeks or so, relying mostly on benzodiazapenes, but with an option of the lunesta type meds.  Don't worry, I won't try to get more vicodin to use as a sleeping pill - I'm not that dumb!

I can only pray this is the light at the end of my insomnia tunnel.  Time will tell, and perhaps on this blog, I will tell as time does.  Now, back to living life. At the age of 49, I'm trying not to cry over the spilt milk of 10 lost years.