It’s pretty fucking sad that the world has reduced me to having to send the message below to the sleep doctor I saw a couple of years ago who is also a neurologist, but the world isn’t going to quiet down just because I want it to. Meanwhile, I need my fucking sleep when I’m on nights! This has to stop. Somehow, it just has to.

Hello, I saw you on November 1, 2016 about my circadian rhythm disorder. I understand there is no cure for CRD but I have another problem which I hope you can advise me on. I am an extremely light sleeper and am woken up regularly when I’m sleeping during the daytime. This has left me feeling tired, unable to think clearly, and unable to function normally. I have to skip physical activities regularly and it’s like my brain runs in slow motion. I can’t always make myself return to sleep just because I’m still tired. I’ve lived in a noisy place for 5 years now. The bedroom is on a busy street but I understand that modern life is noisy everywhere. I get woken up by loud muscle cars and delivery and service vehicles even with a sound machine playing loudly and an earplug in my good ear. I’m deaf in the other ear. Moving to a rural area is no longer a possibility due to both age and money. However, I would have thought I would have adapted to sleeping through the noise or to either being woken up or at least sleeping in spurts when I did get woken up. I understand we can’t train ourselves to need less sleep but how do I get myself to sleep more soundly so these disturbances don’t keep waking me up??? If the sound machine isn’t working for the loudest sounds then would I get used to sleeping through the noise if I actually did away with them instead?

Later…

Finally got caught up on my sleep with 10 hours of shut-eye. So then why am I still exhausted??? I honestly don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me at this point. I did wake up a few times, once to pee, but not due to traffic. That’s pretty amazing considering that the trash and recycle trucks came by today.

I’m going to go as fast as I can and catch up on things. As it is, if I can’t figure out a way to sleep better and get over this exhaustion, I’m looking at voice blogging only. I’m simply run down to the core. I have been seriously considering just doing weekly bullet entries that provide the main highlights of what’s going on and so I can still keep in touch with people, but not the detailed entries I normally do. I simply don’t have the energy anymore. Again, other than regular sleep disturbances, I’m not sure why I’m so tired so much of the time. I haven’t been able to be active for about a week now. It’s like something’s forcing me to live like the disabled person I’m not. It’s very frustrating! I could even do more with anxiety as long as my heart wasn’t racing. It may have been the worst feeling in the world but I could still function. Now I’m so tired I have to do things in spurts. I’m not in perimenopause anymore, I’m certainly not PMSing, I’m not starving, so I don’t understand what’s making me so tired other than the daytime noise.

An article I read recently says you can still be woken up and disturbed by sleep but not know it. The brain registers the sounds and this lowers the quality of your sleep even though you don’t actually wake up. Well, between 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. there definitely would have been at least a dozen or so loud vehicles so I’m sure I registered most of them. Also, since we hear through bone conduction, blocking the ear canal is not enough. That’s why you can put your hands over your ears and still hear, you just don’t hear things as well.

The sleep doctor responded to the message I left him asking what I might be able to do to make me a heavier sleeper so that I can sleep through the daytime noise easier. I’ve got to wonder how people manage to work graves these days unless they’re a really heavy sleeper like Tom. Well, I don’t expect to ever be like him because I’m simply not him, but if there’s anything I could do that might help me, I sure would like to know about it.

The response was as expected and that’s a follow-up appointment since I only saw him once and that was two years ago. Now I’m not sure what to do. On one hand, the last thing I want is yet another appointment and for Tom to have to take more time off and for us to have to spend more money. But on the other hand, I’m tired of being tired and the world isn’t going to get any quieter. This is what it’s going to sound like no matter where we live and there’s no cure for CRD, and maybe there really isn’t anything he can do to make me a heavier sleeper as that very well may be just how I am. Some of us are very light sleepers just like some of us are good with languages. I’m getting desperate enough, though, that I may be willing to try whatever he may recommend despite my fears of medication in general.

Yes, we probably could afford some rural place when he retires even though I suspect we’ll be low-income, but like I said, it’s not feasible to live too far away from civilization when you’re getting older.

Still undecided about my journal. I already started voice blogging, I just don’t know if I’m going to stop the detailed regular text entries or not. I may not have much of a choice if I keep feeling so shitty and I don’t have any energy. I know I have speech-to-text to help but I still have to read and edit through the entries and this takes much longer than voice blogging. The only problem with voice is that it’s not as searchable so that’s why I would keep some sort of a bullet journal that was more like tweets. I’m so exhausted I can barely handle this entry. Really, really hope nothing else is wrong with me!

We got the new toaster with the Best Buy credit we had and it’s a decent toaster even though we won’t use it very often. It’s a combination toaster oven and I like that it’s simple to use and it doesn’t have a million different buttons. My brain is so screwed up these days between aging and not sleeping that I worry I’ll accidentally do something dangerous. I can’t think straight half the time and I can’t remember shit. My TSH has got to be close to normal now, so again, I don’t know what’s going on other than lack of sleep. That’s the only thing I can come up with. So I probably will go ahead and make the appointment at some point as I would rather be told there’s nothing that can be done for me and know I at least tried to help myself, rather than never know for sure.

Slept with my Bluetooth speaker right by my pillow with it playing thunderstorms but it stopped playing by the time I got up to pee 5 hours later even though I had it on loop mode. The battery hadn’t died either so I guess the Internet must have cut out. Because the Internet isn’t yet as reliable as electricity, that’s why I don’t use it for sleeping unless I’m just taking a nap. It won’t override the loudest of sounds but it helps with some of the smaller ones. I just wish we didn’t have roads on three sides of us. Had we gotten a couple of other houses we looked at before we got this one, I may have slept better. The loudest of sounds may have woken me up but perhaps not delivery trucks and things like that.

Tom awoke a little achy last night but hasn’t had any problems with the prednisone so far. Just a slight upset stomach for the first few hours of taking it.

While I am against the unnecessary separating of families (unless perhaps the parents are deliberately letting themselves be arrested so that their kids will get free care?) I don’t see how this equates to the Holocaust. The Jews weren’t breaking any laws. A lot of these immigrants are. Also, no one’s being thrown in concentration camps or ovens. But yeah, if people are simply requesting asylum without breaking laws and you don’t want to give it to them, just turn them away. Don’t throw them in jail and their kids in cages.

Started watching Cold Justice. First I saw Cold Justice murders and now I’m watching Cold Justice sex crimes. Why are there so few American-made shows and movies that aren’t reality shows? Everything is foreign or documentaries! But I can stand to watch these even though they’re a bit depressing.

I watched the movie Brain on Fire and it was a little scary because to think that I, someone who’s a magnet for autoimmune diseases, could end up with one that could attack something a hell of a lot more vital than a thyroid is a bit scary. What that poor woman went through!

Two or three nights ago I had a dream that my weight was down but I don’t see it going down that far without being sick or thyrotoxic. No thanks! I’ll keep the fat. Even so, it was one of those dreams that gave me that feeling only a dream premonitioner can understand. It means something. I just have to figure out what.

I also had this really weird dream that I was walking down a street somewhere on a very windy day. I was wearing a straw hat which blew off and I ended up chasing it down the street. I caught it by this house where a teenage daughter was telling her parents that some boy tried to attack her until he heard them driving up.

I said something about seeing somebody and then the guy said, “Thank you, Jodi,” as I turned and walked away with my runaway hat. I was a little surprised he knew my name.

Then Joe, the mailman, saw my hair left curly for the first time and told me that he never liked it when I straightened my hair, LOL.