in the middle of the night / I go walking in my sleep

[truepenny]

The good news is: the pramipexole, on first contact, works approximately a million times better than the ropinirole and does not make me queasy also too as well. I was able to go to sleep at 10 last night, instead of four this morning.

The bad part of the good news is: I still slept badly. Although I feel a lot better rested this morning, despite being awake from two to three-thirty. And I may have found a new wetware hack: at least for me, at least last night, BenGay worked to alleviate the RLS symptoms. My best guess is that it gave the nerves in my right thigh some REAL INPUT to work with, so they could quit manufacturing sundogs. And the good part of the bad part of the good news is: as I get accustomed to it, I can increase the dose of pramipexole. The doctor started me out with one 0.125 mg tablet. I can eventually go up to as much as four. So if one tablet helps this much, two tablets may actually let me sleep like a (semi-)normal human being again.

The bad news is: dealing with all of this seems to have used up my supply of coping skills for today.

ETA: the sleep clinic called with my bloodwork. Everything's fine except my ferritin. It's at something-teen, and they'd like to see it at fifty or over. So up with the iron supplement! (And the Vitamin C and the fiber and ...)

ETA (2): Okay, the well-rested thing was only temporary. Drat.

Comments

[bluestalking.livejournal.com]

:( *hugs* Stupid non-going-away tired-making health issues.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

My sympathies.

I used to lie awake worrying about my insomnia....

[pameladean]

Oh, I hope the larger dose works! I know there are good reasons to begin with a small one and work upwards, but it's tedious and roller-coastery in the meantime. (Am doing something similar with blood pressure medication.) Disturbed sleep is just hell. The Ben-Gay idea is very stfnal, though.

P.

[larryhammer]

Okay, INTERESTING about the BenGay thing. I may try that tonight -- RLS is more active this week than it's ever been, and I can tell by my twitchiness that it's going to be as gnarly tonight as last night.

Yay new meds working better, even if boo spoons used up already.

---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Let me know if it helps--I'd like more experimental data. :)

[larryhammer]

Ambiguous results last night: it seemed to help a little, till the RLS was set off by the weight of a cat on my hip.

---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh dear.

[marycatelli]

here's to hoping that the well-rested period scales with the dosage

[heresluck]

So apparently nothing is an unmixed blessing, but I am *really* glad to hear that the pramipexole is a marked improvement. Also, I wouldn't be too discouraged about the temporariness of feeling well-rested; you have a massive sleep deficit at this point, no? Which suggests you'll be feeling the aftereffects for a while.

Your iron supplement does include a B-vitamin complex, right?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh lord, do I need to be taking B as well? (I've got D, E, and am adding C. Soon the whole alphabet will be mine!)

[heresluck]

My understanding is that both C and B vitamins help your body absorb iron, plus a B-12 deficiency is responsible for some forms of anemia (and might, come to think of it, be contributing to RLS -- you might ask the folks at Comm Pharm about this).

One of the side effects of my treatment for TB in the early '90s was that it permanently screwed up my body's ability to absorb B vitamins, which ultimately resulted in an iron deficiency -- not because I wasn't getting enough iron, but because I wasn't absorbing enough B vitamins and thus my body couldn't *process* the iron that it was getting. (I discovered this when I tried to give blood, go figure.) When I talked to the good people at Community Pharmacy about this, they said "Oh, you need the Stress-B complex that the Willy St Co-op sells" -- it's a B-complex with iron and C. And it works for me; I'm still on it, in fact.