Good morning everyone,
I hope everyone is doing well this morning. If you aren't, I hope your day gets better.
I came up with a new strategy for last night. I stayed up too long and was too hyper to sleep during the day yesterday like I originally intended to. So instead, I decided that I would go to sleep at the same time everyone on the East Coast was going to sleep. That was the early evening for me here on the West Coast, so it gave me a few extra hours to sleep.
I also took one more Vicodin, even though I hate it, so the painful pulled muscle wouldn't keep waking me up.
Then I have another pill called hydroxyzine, which is an antihistamine. When other people go to the doctor and say they can't sleep they get Ambien. When other people go to the doctor and say they're anxious they get Xanax. When I go to the doctor and say I'm anxious and I can't sleep, I'm given an antihistamine. Granted, they do use hydroxyzine for both anxiety and sleep. It does knock me out for a minimum of 3 days at a time if I take a whole pill. I guess you can't be anxious when you're knocked out for 3 days in a row and then groggy for the next 2. So technically the pill works. But I don't know anyone who has that much time to waste sleeping and being groggy and unable to do anything, particularly when I'm already pretty much non-functional as it is.
When I complained about it, the doctor told me to cut the pill in half. The pill is very, very tiny and very, very hard to cut. When I complained that cutting it in half still knocked me out for 2 days and made me groggy for 2 more days. The doctor told me to cut it even further. I ended up cutting the pill down until it was dust. You really can't do more than cut this pill in half and then cut it in half one more time, so that you have quarters. You can't cut it any lower than that because it turns to dust because of how small it is. The doctor didn't care. I still wasn't allowed to have any pill that might actually help me sleep or be less anxious, but still be relatively awake and functional the next day.
I hadn't taken any of the hydroxyzine in a while because I don't like to add to the grogginess that I already feel on a normal basis, but I'm getting desperate now because I need to sleep. I don't want to start hallucinating like @Jean4 is or feel any sicker than I already do. Granted, it isn't the same as real sleep, but at this point, I'll take anything I can get.
So, I cut the hydroxyzine into quarters. I tried to cut one of those quarters in half, but it was impossible. I tried to take the smallest dose possible without turning the pill into dust.
So I took one Vicodin and then one little piece of the hydroxyzine. Luckily, it was enough to keep me pain-free enough to sleep and drowsy enough so that I could sleep through the night without waking up. I only woke up once to bump Stan's thread and post a song that I couldn't get out of my head. After that, I slept straight through the rest of the night until about 7:30 AM, west coast time, this morning.
However, right now I'm incredibly groggy and think I could go back to sleep again. This time I actually am going back to sleep again (unlike yesterday). I'm not going to start answering posts. I'll answer them later. Couldn't answer them now if I wanted to anyway because I'm way too groggy and out of it. I wrote most of the above post last night when I was still awake.
I just wanted to check in. I'll probably be checking in and out all day depending on how groggy I continue to be. Going back to sleep now. Talk to everyone later.