Tag Archives: Restless Leg Syndrome

Oh, Holey Night

19 Jan

In spite of all our best efforts, now both of us have this horrible cold.  The Squire is still sleeping in the recliner in the TV room, while the cat has been helping me hold down the bed.  The Squire seems to be on the mend, but I am now in the middle of this mess.

We headed upstairs when we got back from picking up the “Dough-Nation” from Panera. The Squire settled down with a book, and I did the same. I read for about an hour, but my Restless Leg Syndrome was still giving me fits, so I went downstairs to take a bit more medicine. His door was still ajar, and he was sound asleep with the book open on his chest. I removed the book, covered him up, and turned off the light. I tossed and turned a bit, and the last time I looked at the clock, it was after midnight.

The dog started to bark around 3AM, but by the time I put on my robe The Squire had already headed down to see what all the fuss was about. Nada. Blazer started up again a few minutes before 4, and this time we both went down. Not a thing to see, but we turned off the alarm and let the dog go take a really good look. Whatever was out there was on the other side of the stream. Blazer gave it a good barking at, and returned to the house with a smug expression.

I took a dose of cough syrup and staggered back to bed, hoping for a bit of uninterrupted sleep. No such luck. Even with the fan making white noise in the background, I had a hard time falling back to sleep, and then at 7AM Eddie decided it was high time for me to come feed him.  Yeesh. Between 10PM and 7AM I managed to get about five hours of sleep.

I’m gonna go take a nap. Don’t call me. I’ll call you.

When The Squire came down at 4AM he was in his night clothes, but when I covered him up at midnight, he was still fully dressed.  He asked me if I had wakened him and told him to change, which I had not.

“Must have been a Samuel Ready fire drill.” *

*  When I was at school I woke up one morning with my jeans (dungarees, we called them) over my PJ bottoms. Apparently, we had a fire drill in the middle of the night, and I’d gotten up, dressed, and gone out to stand on the athletic field with every other girl in the school. Couldn’t prove it by me. If it hadn’t been that everybody was talking about it, and the head mistress had congratulated us on our perfect performance, I’d have guessed the girls in my dorm had played a trick on me.

 

 

 

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Fizzle

2 May

I never watch TV – well, I do watch the Big Bang Theory, but that’s it – so I was surprised last night when a friend at our knitting group told me we were in for a big storm. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “They are talking about flooding, with high winds and all that stuff.”

I hustled home, and The Squire and I moved our cars to the top of the hill, put floatables up on the picnic table or stashed them in the tractor cart. We had picked up some things to FreeCyle for a friend who is moving, and we lugged those items into the kitchen. Actually, we were kind of hoping for a big blow. This house is not salable, and if we ever want to move the only thing is to hope we can get insurance money if a tree falls on the house.

My anticonvulsant wasn’t working last night, so I had to get up and take a second pill. (Don’t let anybody tell you Restless Leg Syndrome is a “minor inconvenience! It rapidly goes from Restless Legs to Restless Arms, and all points in between.) By the time I finally got to bed, it was midnight and the stars were shining. If we got more than fifteen drops of rain, I’d be surprised.

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Restless Leg Syndrome

13 Apr

I have had Restless Leg Syndrome since about 1985 or so, and have been taking Klonopin pretty nearly continuously since then to control the spasms.  I was taking a quarter of a half milligram tablet when my dad had his brain surgery in 1991; I took two pills, and they lasted me the entire week I stayed in Roxboro with my mom.

My regular neurologist retired and I went in to meet his replacement and go over my meds. He informed me than Klonopin was “no longer the drug of choice” for treating RLS. Today, if a doctor told me that, I’d just tell him it works, and that’s that. Go away and leave me alone. Well, the first thing he did was put me on Sinemet, which had a horrific rebound effect. (Doctors call this augmentation; I call it Hell.) It didn’t allow me to sleep all night, but would wake me up after four or five hours with leg spasms, and if I sat still for too long – such as driving to work – my legs would begin dancing all over the place. He refused to put me back on Klonopin, but tried Permax, which made me pass out without warning,  several other equally useless (or worse) things, and finally started me on Neurontin, which led to one of the best lines I’ve ever pulled off.

Neurontin caused horrible insomnia. I was getting by on three hours sleep – if I was lucky. I  had a friend, a surgeon, who used to save me his used scalpel blades. This was back before you had to worry about a lot of odd bugs, but I would boil them, toss the rusty ones, and use the good ones in my X-acto knife. One night, I was working on a dollhouse, and the knife rolled across the table and hit my foot. When I reached down to retrieve it, I discovered it has slipped between two metatarsals and pierced an artery in my foot. I tried to stop the bleeding but only succeeded in turning the bathroom into a scene from the Maryland Chainsaw Massacres. I finally woke The Squire, who came down and patched me up.

Of course, he was afraid I was going to Get Something. “Oh, for pete’s sake, I was working on the dollhouse. The worst that can happen is I’ll get shingles!”

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