So the whole sleeping thing isn’t getting much better. It’s 5:30am and I still haven’t gotten to sleep. Last night I actually fell asleep like a normal person – around midnight I got super tired and I fell asleep rather easily. Only problem is, I couldn’t wake up until around 3:00pm. I swear, something is seriously messed up. Well, okay, it’s already been pretty well established that my body is royally messed up to the point that sometimes I really wonder how it’s still functioning at all. But I mean specifically in relation to sleep.
Well… I do know something is messed up specifically related to sleep, but I only know what’s happened, not what caused it. I had a 24-hour test done to determine certain levels of hormones and chemicals produced by the adrenal gland. See, the reason I’ve been so sick is I’m carrying around 100 pounds of fluid all over my body and no one’s been able to figure out why yet. It’s exceedingly painful, to the point where I can’t even really get out of bed anymore (I’m serious about that. Dead serious. I have to plan when I get up to go to the bathroom cause it just hurts so damn much. But for some reason, a lot of people still don’t really seem to grasp that fact.) When you start swelling, one of the first things the doctors look at is your liver. Part of that is checking out the adrenal gland, since a lot of the chemicals it produces/releases have to do with liver function.
Anyway. There were several bizarre findings which all pretty much showed my adrenal gland is royally messed up. But there was one bit in particular that’s quite interesting – and by interesting, I mean yet again, it sucks to be a medical enigma. There’s this hormone your adrenal gland produces called cortisol. It’s produced in a rather steady cycle – to put it really simply, its production is ramped up in the mornings, and lowered in the evening. It’s often referred to as the “stress hormone”, because it’s awfully good at waking the body up.
As usual, my body has to do the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to be doing. So in normal people, your cortisol production goes into overdrive in the morning to help you wake up. During my 24-hour hormone test, my cortisol levels were SO low in the morning they didn’t even register. That’s low. That’s lower than low. That’s insanely low. Leave it to my body to do something that extreme. But not only that, it’s going to do something that extreme, yet leave absolutely no other trace so it’s impossible to figure out why.
What I’m getting at here is, don’t blame me, people! I can’t sleep! My body’s going completely haywire and it’s been proven time and again lately that not a single system in my body is working the way it should. There’s no such thing as a sleep cycle for me anymore, and believe me, it’s really getting to me. My memory is in absolute shambles – on Friday, I felt like such an idiot… I mixed up my brother’s screen name with one of my friends, and I got confused when my brother IMed me and I couldn’t remember which name belonged to whom. I was too ashamed to just ask, but I couldn’t even figure it out until he mentioned his wife’s name. Ugh. I suck. I totally suck. But it’s not my fault!! That’s what kills me about this. It’s not like I can identify some bad habit where I’m doing this to myself. I can’t even identify any mistake I made health-wise. I’m doing everything I can, doctors are doing all they can, and yet still I’m falling apart and I have the brain of a goldfish.
I’m really losing it, this is driving me crazy. Now not only is the pain horrific and unending, now my brain’s crapping out on me big time. Needless to say, my emotions aren’t so happy about this either, and they’re not exactly stable. I’m not doing so well with sarcasm or cynicism, so just consider yourself warned. And I’m sorry, I’m lashing out more than I should, and I know it. It’s just no matter what I do, I can’t dig myself out of this mental ditch, and I’m too tired to keep pointlessly clawing at the dirt with it always falling back in on me time and time again. You know what? Forget tired, tired isn’t even close. It’s exhausted. Just flat out exhausted. All the way through every single freaking part of my body, it’s pure exhaustion. It’s what I feel like when I try to wake up, and there’s no getting over it.
*sigh* I’ve decided the only thing I can do right now is distract myself. So I’ve been throwing myself into a project just to take my mind off it. It’s going slow and it’s frustrating to see how futile some attempts are to do anything at all. But without focusing on something, I just sit here and feel like crap all day. If I’m gonna feel like crap, I at least don’t want to have to think about it.
I wish I could sleep, though…
Sorry, I didn’t mean for this blog to turn into a rant. I was planning on talking about music I just found from the 1920’s, but yeah… well, welcome to my brain.