I knew I should have stayed in bed today. The trouble is, I stayed in bed for the last two days, really. There are only so many days in a row a person can stay in bed in our society if they aren’t actively dying. And even then, I’ve seen bright eyed, false smiled nurse type people trying to goad some poor old soul into sitting up in a chair for a few minutes.

But, I digress.

I’ll try to give you all the good news first. I’m finally going to have a sleep study. And I am almost 100% sure I didn’t slide into the back of the lady whose car I hit this morning because I was asleep at the wheel....

It was icy. The roads were full of people having fender benders. The police didn’t have to come and there was no damage that I could see to her car. The other driver said she was fine, and, after she calmed down a minute, said she understood it could be difficult for me to stop. She accepted my apology very formally. She was Asian. I think she more wanted my apology, which was sincere, than she did the insurance information. I couldn’t have been going any faster than 3 miles an hour, because it was in that stop and go traffic on Rt. 29…but even though my foot was on the brake my cruiser didn’t stop in time. Crunch.

That makes me the asshat bad driver. The guy at my insurance company told me to try to hit something less expensive the next time. It was an Acura.

The bad news is all from my doctor’s visit. It’s like taking your car in for an oil change. You think nothing is wrong, they come out and show you that your air filter is all gunked up, recommend a higher grade oil and start making reference to strange, expensive sounding things surrounding the issue of your brakes. I only went in for a physical – basically just to see if my cholesterol went down.

“Is your blood pressure normally high?” the physicians assistant asked.

“No. It’s normally 120/80. Why? What’s it now?”

“155/105”

“What?! No it’s not. It wasn’t that high when I broke my ankle – there must be something wrong with that reader”

“Maybe you’re just stressed out from the drive. I’ll ask the doctor to take it again.”

But I wasn’t stressed out from the drive. In fact, I was as calm as I’d been in weeks.

I work really hard at staying calm. Granted I let it all hang out here on the blog – if I didn’t have some outlet I’d probably spontaneously combust. But, in most situations, only one person can go crazy at a time, and since 9 times out of 10 the other person is already acting crazy that leaves me to be the one who has to act like a calm, rational person by default. No matter if I feel like jumping out of my skin when the boss sends me an urgent e-mail with “see me” all in caps, I feel like calling the person who is telling me that they can’t disclose what the house appraised for before the contract is written a liar, I feel like reaching through the phone line and ripping the lips off of yet another person at the IRS who doesn’t know what I’m talking about and has no idea who to call to find out. And I’m exhausted, really, really tired all the time, because I still can’t sleep, even though I’m taking this medication which is supposed to help. So far I’ve had all of the side effect – weight gain – and none of the benefit. My contact lenses keep falling out of my eyes and the lab lost my blood work – so we have no idea if any of this has to do with my thyroid, or what. I’d like to mackerel slap the person at the lab too, but what good would it do? They still wouldn’t find my blood work and I’d have a criminal record for assaulting somebody with a dead fish.

“…So basically I’m depressed, I’m anxious, I hate my job, I can’t concentrate, I’m fat, and my blood pressure is now so out of control that I’d decline my own application for life insurance. But I haven’t lost my sense of humor!” I told Dr. A.

“You still hate your job? I was hoping it was just the stress of the promotion the last time I saw you. What do you hate about it most?”

“Well besides having to sit on my rapidly spreading butt in a cube which is less space than the average prison cell, and the gossip and backstabbing which is office work in general, the work I am doing is of absolutely no help to anyone. Yet, I can’t stop giving a darn about people. And I am now burdened by the knowledge that there is some poor man out in the world somewhere who is suffering from such terrible alcoholism that he allowed an infection in a very private area of his anatomy to turn into gangrene and it’s about to fall off! I’m not making this up!”

“No, I’m sure you’re not. But it’s one thing if you went to medical school and signed up to get involved.” He said, reflectively.

“It would be one thing if I went to medical school and there was something I could DO for him. But I can’t even give him a kind word. At least when I was doing the interviews I could be sympathetic. Now I’m just appalled. There’s people with asthma who smoke, people with hepatitis who drink every night, people with epilepsy who do street drugs, people with such serious mental health issues that they are literally talking to their home appliances but can’t get help because their insurance won’t cover it, men who are full blown diabetics, have cirrhosis of the liver, and failed the eye test but you know what they came to see the doctor about?”

“Erectile dysfunction.” My doctor said.

“You got it!”

“You’d be surprised how many lives have been saved by viagra. If it wasn’t for that, I don’t think a lot of men would ever see doctor.”

“But no wonder I don’t get any sleep. When we went on vacation my husband said I thrashed around like I was possessed, talked in my sleep and was snoring like a mastiff. I had one of those episodes of sleep paralysis, and one night he said I was up out of bed walking around the room. I don’t remember any of that, except the sleep paralysis thing. I don’t know what to do. I’m at the end of my rope. Really. I’m not kidding.”

“I know you’re not” he said calmly. Because at that point, I was the one acting crazy, but I figured I had a right since I was the patient, and besides, I’d made him laugh so hard he had snorted. He looked back at my chart. “You never mentioned sleep paralysis before.”

“Does it make a difference?”

“Snoring? Thrashing around…that could be sleep apnea.”

“Don’t you have to be really heavy to get that?”

“No, not at all. There are two kinds, and one is a central nervous system problem. That could be elevating your blood pressure. That could be causing your depression. Let’s get a sleep study. Soon. As soon as you can. In the meantime, in case it’s not that, double up your anti-depressant and see if that helps you calm down and focus.”

“Double!”

“It’s only the dose you were on when you first came in, remember? Before you went through that period of no insurance and do it yourself medical care.”

So I did. Maybe it even helped because while I was setting up the booth at WAM on Saturday they played an old Chipmunk’s album in it’s entirety and I didn’t even get up and rip the speaker out of the wall. By Sunday I was a little relaxed. By Monday and Tuesday, all I could do was sleep. It was like my body got the hang of it and was determined to make up for lost time. The trouble with sleep is that it’s involuntary. I knew I was going to sleep no matter where I was….so I had to call out sick at work both days.

I know it’s just the adjustment to the higher dose of medication…but the sleep – the rest, did make me feel better, more clear headed and alert. At least I thought I was until I ran into that Acura. Now I don’t know what to think. Maybe I’ll just eat lunch. That doesn’t require too much concentration.