Life without Benadryl

Okay. I left a couple of halfway decent comment’s over at Kate’s place, so perhaps my brain is working well enough to write an honest-to-God post. It helps that (A) I’m drinking my coffee — and here at Chez Walnut, the coffee will put hair on your chest. The depilatories are starting to give Karen quite a rash. (B) It’s early morning, so the world has not yet had a chance to crush me like a snail on an elementary school playground. (C) I got a good night’s sleep last night.

Yes! I did! And I didn’t even need Benadryl*.

I’ve used Benadryl as a sleeper for at least ten years. Back in residency, work tired me out enough that I didn’t need drugs to sleep. But no one can stay at that pace forever. Life slows down after residency, and that’s when the old problems emerge.

I don’t take much Benadryl. Most I’ve ever taken was two 25 mg pills at bedtime, which left me looking like an extra from a George Romero Dead flick. With regular exercise, I managed to cut that back to one pill, then a half, which has been my dose for well over a year. Half a Benadryl helps, but doesn’t prevent these occasional days-long bouts of insomnia. Thus far, I’ve resisted the urge to up the dose. Even one Benadryl leaves me molasses-blooded for hours the next day.

So, how did I manage to get to sleep without Benadryl? With another drug, of course! But not just any drug. I don’t do well with traditional sleepers. Benzodiazepines made the insomnia far, far worse; Ambien left me weighing the relative merits of a bullet in the head versus driving off a bridge. (Bullet in the head pros: fast; probably painless; surefire — sorry — provided I aim correctly. Bullet in the head cons: messy corpse; messy death site; disfigurement if I don’t aim correctly. And so forth.) Benadryl might leave me hungry for brains, but at least it doesn’t make me want to see my own brains splattered on the wall.

No, this new drug is Rozerem, which, based upon the TV commercial, puts you to sleep by making you hallucinate arguments between Abe Lincoln and a groundhog. Or maybe it works like that resonator in From Beyond, and any day now my pineal gland will burst out of my forehead, a sticky little periscope with a mind of its own. I haven’t had visions of an alternate plane of existence yet, but I’ve only taken it one night. Give it time, okay?

Rozerem is a melatonin receptor agonist. That means it mimics melatonin, the body’s hormone (produced by the pineal gland in response to darkness) which makes you sleepy when the lights go out. The key here is light. If the lights come back on, the sleepiness goes away almost instantly. That’s an important feature for a doc who must, occasionally, dredge his ass out of bed to go to the ER in the middle of the night.

Here’s a picture of my pineal gland:

The pineal gland is a light-sensitive organ deep within the brain. It controls our body’s circadian rhythm, gives us hard-ons, fights cancer, and determines whether we go to heaven or hell.

Okay, so I’m paraphrasing.

It wasn’t a perfect night’s sleep. I could tell it was war, a struggle between the soporific effect of my excited melatonin receptors and whatever crap makes my brain want to stay alert all night long. Nevertheless, I went to sleep promptly, got up only three or four times, and was able to get back to sleep each time, probably within five or ten minutes. Not bad. And I can feel the difference in my brain sans Benadryl. It isn’t a huge difference, but there it is, as manifested by a willingness to write. And here I am.

That’s it, folks, cuz I have stuff to do and people to do it to. The chore list today: pet store for ferret food and crickets, grocery store, pharmacy for Karen’s meds, hospital to check my ICU patients, gym because this weird mesomorphic body of mine demands it. Laundry, dishes (done), make dinner. Live-blogging at 7 PM, if all goes well. And yes, I haven’t forgotten, I have an assignment for The Fix I need to get to as well.

Who knows, maybe I’ll even feel like writing a bit of fiction this weekend.

D.

*That’s diphenhydramine, the same drug you’ll find in Tylenol PM and half a dozen other OTC sleepers. It’s an antihistamine with a side effect so impressive it’s used mainly for that purpose, not for its allergy-battling might.