Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Earlier I told my doctor I'd tried Neurontin before, and the previous doctor and I had decided it didn't really work for me, but I couldn't remember why. It's coming back to me.

I was feeling too tired to get much else done, and I certainly didn't get anywhere near enough sleep this morning, so I figured I'd try to crash early. So I took 300mg of Neurontin and waited an hour, then went to bed. For another half hour it didn't seem to do much, so I moved all the things I didn't get done today to tomorrow's to-do list in my DayRunner. Then I started to feel it ... my shoulders unclenched a little bit. The feeling from my neck down was somewhat like being drunk, but with none of the effects alcohol produces from the neck up. So I lay down and turned off the light, and figured it was time to try to let the drug do its thing and put me to sleep.

Soon I started feeling drugged, in a sortakinda Xanax-ish way; then sleep paralysis kicked in (it sometimes does that out-of-synch with my actually sleeping, in the past few years) and I slowly drifted off.

My legs woke me, doing the "gotta move; gonna cramp; not cramping; gonna pretend to be about to cramp; gotta move" thing ([expletive], I hate that), and I slowly drifted back into consciousness, feeling as though I'd been asleep for about two hours. Long enough to have slept a little, not enough to have slept long enough to count. Sleep paralysis took a long time to let go, and I still felt drugged (differently than before, but drugged -- like a tranquilizer??), so I tried to go back to sleep. Eventually, I realized going back to sleep Just Wasn't Going To Happen, so I rolled over to check the time.

It was less than half an hour after I'd gone to sleep.

So now I'm awake but feeling drugged; my head's a little foggy and my coordination is a little off, but at least my shoulders and the upper third of my back feel less tight than they did before (and maybe my thighs, but everything else hurts the same). The druggedness is rather distracting and annoying. (Hmm. It feels like an anti-siezure drug, which I'm told is one of its uses. Why doesn't that aspect help with restless legs?) So I didn't get enough sleep, and now I'm not sure how easy it'll be to work now that I'm awake again. (And, ironically, my forearms are cramping up from typing more quickly than they usually do.) All in all, tonight's experiment is a lose.

Now, knowing my body, I can expect that tomorrow will either show a greater reaction to the drug or a lesser one. Lesser is more likely, but hey, I could be wrong and it could actually make me sleep. The before-I-fall-asleep sensations are kind of interesting and almost pleasant (they'd be annoying if I weren't trying to get to sleep); sort of a bit of an "unclenching" and later a bit of a float-off-to-sleep feeling. The later sensations are distinctly Not To My Liking. I don't like feeling drugged. (Yes, I take narcotics for pain. They DON'T do this to me; all they do is take the pain down one small notch and interfere a little with my sense of rythym. None of the floaty/loopy/zoned/drowsy/etc. effects others have described. This feels like I've been tranqed and includes half of the aspects of alcohol intoxication that I don't like.)

I guess I should do a web search to find out more about this drug. If it's a short-acting thing like Xanax is, intended to let me get to sleep but not keep me asleep, I can predict with some confidence how the next week will go: the duration will get shorter and shorter with each dose, until my body finally starts ignoring it. With Xanax that took only three doses, back in the 1980s. If it's supposed to do its thing all night and keep me from waking up prematurely, the week will be a little harder to predict.

It's now an hour after I woke up (the CD is nearing the end of the fourth movement now), and the drugged feeling is significantly diminished from when I started writing this. It's down to the feeling that my field of view has narrowed (it hasn't, but it feels as though I'm not seeing the stuff in my peripheral vision even though I can detect it when I test it), being dizzy on the stairs, and feeling like my head is full of mud (though less so than an hour ago) and my eyes have to work twice as hard to see. I'm betting that it's not a Xanax-like short-acting drug, but my body is trying very hard to turn it into one.

Oh, the number of drugs my body either eliminates extremely quickly or requires such a high level of that I only feel the effects at absolute peak blood levels ... It certainly makes drugging me quite a challenge. Inconvenient, that. (Most of the time anyhow. Sometimes it's kind of nice to know, "This feeling will go away very soon." But when what's about to go away is, for example, pain relief, that's not so good.) As much as I hate having blood drawn, it'd be worth it (once) to get stuck as many times as it'd take to find out just how quickly my liver and kidneys are clearing all these things out of my blood.

I wonder if my druggedness shows in my writing. I'm a little too close to it to tell.