ME again

Hello again Louisa

First, just to say please don't ever worry about asking - and whatever it is, you will usually find someone who has experience and can advise.

Sleep can be a real problem - I haven't slept through the night for several years now (not just arthritis, but I know how difficult lack of sleep can be, whatever the reason). Occasionally I get a "burst" of 4 hours or so, but usually I "catnap" for hour or two at a time. As DD says, strange though it sounds, you do get used it over time, and you will find your own strategies for coping until, hopefully, things improve for you. I have recently discovered the joys of audiobooks and often I find I drift off after just a few minutes listening - or at the very least it helps to take my mind off things a bit. If you decided to try that, you could play them with only one earplug, and the volume low so you would hear your daughter.

Having said all that, hopefully once you can get a proper diagnosis - you mentioned in your previous post that RA was one of the "prime suspects" you will be able to get onto some proper meds which hopefully will control things a bit for you and will make sleep easier. Co-Cos may well help, and can sometimes make you drowsy, helping you to sleep, but as you have found it tends to be fairly short acting and it just deals with the symptoms, not with the underlying inflammation. Has your doc given you any anti-inflammatories to try? I ask because I find them to be longer lasting than the painkillers. There are lots of different ones so you might need to try a few before you find one which suits you. Dicolofenac works well for me. In terms of sleeping tabs (and I'm thinking here of things like Temazepam) - please tread very carefully. My experience is that they can potentially be useful for short-term use but they can be VERY addictive and, if you have a GP who just keeps prescribing them, without questioning, over time, you could end up with more problems to deal with. My experience with sleeping tabs is that they helped me to drift off to sleep quickly, but they didn't do anything to stop the pain etc waking me up. Some people take Amytriptylene (?sp) which I think they find helpful, and I think that's a different drug category from "normal" sleeping tablets.

Hot flushes can, I know, make things even more difficult. I have a powerful pedestal fan at the foot of the bed and when a hot flush strikes, I peel off everything I can and sit with the fan blasting, flapping a cold flannel around until it passes. Luckily I have a very tolerant husband but the flushes are so bad at the moment that he has decamped into the spare room. I feel very guilty about that but at least when I am up and about in the night I don't disturb him so much. Do mention the hot flushes to the GP Louisa, if you haven't already, because it would be good to know what's behind it (eg meds, early menopause) and to know if there is anything which can be done to help.

Thinking of you - and please do keep asking. We are always happy to listen - and to help wherever we can.

Tillyxxx