Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

A re-edited version of something I posted to a mailing list...

My sleep generally sucks. (This is not surprising, with fibromyalgia.) But the couple of times I've gotten halfway decent sleep in reasonable amounts lately have been after eating scrambled eggs with potatoes. Thursday night a light bulb went on and I did a web search for eggs and tryptophan because I had no idea whether eggs were high in tryptophan or not. I found "Food for Sleep" on AskDrSears.com, which looks interesting. (It says "scrambled eggs and cheese" is a good sleepy food. When I make scrambled eggs, it's roughly equal parts egg and cheese, and then I add random other stuff you'd put in an omelette ... so what I make is closer to a fritata(sp?) than anything else.)

Note that I haven't noticed any special soporific effect from most of the other foods on the "Snooze Foods" list on that page. (Though I remember that in 1985 or 1986 (back when I ate meat), on a trip to Atlanta where my boss kept picking steak houses to go to for dinner, I felt extremely lethargic after a few days. It was about five times as much red meat as I was used to eating at that time.)

I usually eat eggs on toast when I eat eggs. I used potatoes for my starch recently because I was low on bread, and it seemed to make a difference (I'll be experimenting further with this). I did read on the web that eating carbohydrates at the same time as the tryptophan-containing foods increases the effectiveness of the tryptophan, but I appear to be missing a clue as to why two starchy carb-foods (toast vs. potatoes) are so different. (Note that nutrition -- and food science in general -- is not my strong suit.)

Now, as a fibromyalgia patient, my doctors have tried various things to help me sleep. Melatonin didn't work. Xanax doesn't work. Antidepressants make me depressed (and I don't mean a subtle effect here -- one turned me into a fucking zombie). Neurontin is equally likely to make things better or worse on any given night. There was an anti-anxiety drug that produced extreme personality changes. There was something else (muscle relaxant?) that made me feel hung-over in the morning with a coffee-grounds taste in my mouth. Could tryptophan be the answer? Something so simple after all the other stuff that was supposed to do similar things to my brain chemistry failed? (As far as I can tell, most of the things I've been on do really similar things in the brain.)

So of course the next direction to go with this is tryptophan suplements in pill form. If this really does do the trick, and continues to work for more than a week, getting the tryptophan into me without all the calories and cholesterol would be a Very Good Thing. (Oh, I'd really like to lose weight. Eating heavy before bed doesn't seem to be the way to do that.)

So the week's big question is: How long will it take me to get ahold of my rheumatologist to ask him about this? (I'm in an HMO.) Or will I have to wait until my next appointment with him (end of December) to ask? Wheee.