Month: November 2021

More Insomnia

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I decided to finally try ZzzQuil; it seems like there are multiple varieties of ZzzQuil out there, with different active ingredients. The variety I initially looked at, listed melatonin as the active ingredient. This is why I hadn’t tried it before now, as I had already tried melatonin supplements with little luck. Then recently, I heard an ad for ZzzQuil that said something vague that I don’t remember at all, but I remember the ad made it sound like there was an actual drug (not just a “dietary supplement”) in the product. So I went back to the pharmacy and this time I found a variety that lists diphenhydramine as the active ingredient. Now THAT sounds like a drug.

The first night, I took the recommended dose at bedtime. I ended up getting nearly six hours of sleep, which is better than I had gotten the previous few nights, but still had me wide awake at 3:30 AM. So the next night, I decided not to take ZzzQuil at bedtime. Instead, I took it in the middle of the night, after I had slept awhile and awakened far too early. This resulted in about seven and a half hours of total sleep, but it was not continuous, and the quality/depth of the sleep was not very good. I’ll keep trying it this way over the next couple days, though. My next appointment with my Parkinson’s specialist is on Monday. I’ll ask him about prescription sleep aids.

Unrelated thought:

I’ve often heard magma referred to as molten rock, but nobody ever refers to water as molten ice. Why is that?

2022 Travel

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It occurs to me that if this is going to be a Parkinson’s Travel Blog, then I probably ought to start planning some travel. So, here’s my first draft of an extremely tentative schedule for the upcoming year.

February: Central and western Florida (Disney, Busch Gardens, Salvador Dali and Ringling Brothers museums)

April: Texas (Sand Festival, Southwest Railroad Museum, two Six Flags parks)

June: Ohio (Cedar Point & Kings Island) or Canada (Banff and Jasper national parks)

August: Vermont (Cheesemaker’s Festival, multiple museums and hikes)

October: NYC (Open House New York, multiple museums, helicopter tour)

November: Central and eastern North Carolina (Kitty Hawk, historic towns around Albemarle Sound)

In the meantime, I will continue doing Throw-Back Thursdays, where I post about places I visited during my pre-blog years.

Insomnia (cont’d)

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The giant wooden mallet did not help me sleep. It just made a few small birds appear out of nowhere and fly in circles around my head while twittering melodiously.

The problem with the insomnia is that it exacerbates other problems. Since I’m no longer working, being tired during the day isn’t that big a deal. But when I’ve gone a couple days with very little sleep, anxiety starts creeping in. And this is not the usual garden-variety background anxiety that I encounter nearly every day during my “off periods”. Serious lack of sleep can lead to serious anxiety – not quite to the level of a panic attack, but it gets close. Fortunately, I do have a supply of Lorazepam, which I take only when truly needed, and which is very effective (though far from immediate) at killing anxiety and depression.

Then there’s this:

If I want to read a book during the day or even at bedtime, I can’t get more than a couple pages into it before I start nodding off. So, when I wake up at 2 or 4 in the morning, I should be able to just read a little and I’ll go back to sleep, right? Nope. When I want reading to put me to sleep, I can read for hours – even if it’s boring reading! Same goes for TV – seems like I’m always falling asleep when I try to pay attention to a show, but if I turn on the same show in the hopes it will put me to sleep…doesn’t happen.

I find myself wondering if there have been any studies to determine how dogs can sleep so damn much.

Insomnia

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I’ve often heard it said that Parkinson’s Disease (PD) affects each individual differently. As the disease progresses (and as I try different medications), I’m noticing that PD affects the same individual differently, at different points in time. At one time, tremors were my most bothersome symptom. Since starting Levodopa a few years ago, the tremors have been largely controlled, replaced with a growing (sometimes almost crippling) fatigue. On my latest “drug cocktail” the fatigue is significantly reduced, but I’m still not sleeping well.

My insomnia started small, and advanced slowly enough that I was able to implement a series of temporary fixes that didn’t seem temporary at the time. A couple times each year, I would think that I had found THE solution to my sleep issues…only to have the problem return a few months later. I blamed my bed, the T-shirts I wore to bed, my alarm clock – I made changes in each of these areas, and each helped…for a while. It was probably about a year ago that I finally accepted that this insomnia is part of the PD, and isn’t going to be solved by changing something outside my body. I tried dietary supplements (melatonin, magnesium, iron, CBD) and NyQuil. As with the previous approaches, most of these seemed to help, but only for a while. The most frustrating part of it all is that once in awhile, I get a solid night of sleep, and can’t figure out WHY.

But after watching some old Warner Brothers cartoons, I think I finally found the solution. I’m gettin’ me a giant wooden mallet. Or maybe an anvil.

Lodging With a Barker

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This past Saturday was Moving Day NC Triangle – an annual Parkinson’s charity fundraising event in Raleigh. As usual, I added another east Carolina activity to make the trip that much more worthwhile. But unlike previous years, I now have Bear. When we’re at home, Bear is a serious barker. Any human or dog that walks by the house gets a good talking-to. But when I take him to dog parks, stores, friends’ homes, etc., he doesn’t have these barking fits. In other words, Bear seems to be barking to defend his “den”. This has led me to wonder…would Bear consider a hotel room to be his den? I certainly can’t take him to a hotel or an RV park if he’s going to launch into a tirade every time some one walks by. So for this trip, I went the Airbnb route, and found us a cottage in Carolina Beach.

On the night we arrived, Bear seemed quite agitated and confused. In fact, I may have gotten more sleep than he did overnight, as he was still fidgeting and whimpering as I fell asleep. I slept better than expected, but still woke up at 3 AM after five hours of sleep. I turned on the TV and started watching nature shows, and eventually got a little more sleep on the couch (and more importantly, came to realize that sometimes when I feel half asleep, I’m actually asleep). By 8:30 AM, Bear was looking out the front window, barking at passersby as if he owned the place. So, yeah. No hotels for Bear.

Mannitol

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I brought my laptop out onto the back patio, for some peaceful writing time. And as soon as I sat down, some hoser across the pond fires up his leafblower. I think I now understand how dogs feel about vacuum cleaners. The dude is blowing leaves off his roof – which my new roof’s warranty says I’m supposed to do. Life is like a box of liquid shits. Sorry. I shouldn’t mention liquid shits on a blog about Parkinson’s. Some of you would probably give your left arm just to experience diarrhea again.

Speaking of which, I haven’t addressed mannitol in this blog yet. Two or three years ago, I kept seeing links to a news story about a study in Israel where mannitol was found to help reduce Parkinson’s symptoms. So I did a little research. I learned that mannitol is an “alcohol sugar” (whatever that means) and that it is used to reduce swelling of the brain in cases of head trauma. I also found that it’s available without a prescription and can easily be found on Amazon. So I ordered some, and the results have been excellent! For some things. It did NOT help with motor symptoms, fatigue, or sleep issues. But I (temporarily) got my sense of smell back, my speech became louder and clearer, and (most important in my case) it all but eliminated the “urinary urgency” that I had been dealing with! But the very first thing I learned after trying mannitol was that it is a potent laxative. So I highly recommend mannitol to all my fellow Parkies, with the caveat that it should be taken in small doses throughout the day rather than all at once.

Big Bucks for Booze Barons

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I stopped drinking when I started my latest medication (GoCovri). If you read the fine print that comes with medicines, you’ll find that an awful lot of them say you should avoid alcohol while taking the drug. Usually, this is just a generic warning – a Mr. Mackey “alcohol is bad, mmkay” kind of thing. But in the case of my latest meds, I found documentation that specifically explains what could happen, with enough detail to where it’s actually believable. So I stopped.

This got me to thinking: how many people are there who aren’t drinking (or aren’t drinking as much) simply because of the medications they’re on? There’s gotta be millions of us! Now what if, instead of just coming up with drugs to perpetually treat the symptoms, someone were to discover an actual cure for diabetes, Parkinson’s, etc.? Millions of newly cured people could come off their meds, which would allow them to start boozing it up again, leading to BILLIONS of dollars of additional profits for the alcohol industry. So, to the big bucks boys of the booze business (the likes of @AnheuserBusch, @BACARDI, and others), please invest in medical research aimed at finding actual cures…you WILL reap the benefits!