Sleep Is for the Weak, Right?

Pardon me if this post is only semi-coherent. My insomnia is becoming insurmountable, and I'm so tired that semi-coherent feels like it might be a stretch. I am honestly starting to wonder if I will ever get a non-medicated night's sleep again.

For the last 3-4 weeks, I have fallen into this horrible sleepless cycle. In the past, if I had trouble falling asleep, I could usually rely on Benadryl or melatonin to do the trick. It didn't always work, but most of the time it did. And then, all of a sudden, it didn't. I found myself lying awake night after night, and no combination (or amount) of my old sleep-inducing friends seemed to help. It felt like no matter how tired I was, my brain just wouldn't let me sleep. I'd start to drift, then, BAM! Wide awake.

There I am, lying there, mind spinning, and the only thing I can focus on is Matt's breathing. His loud, constant, INCREDIBLY ANNOYING breathing that invariably turns into snoring. And that is literally all I can hear. Even when it's fairly quiet, it seems so loud that I wonder how the children can possibly sleep through it. So then I start kicking him, or elbowing him, or hissing "Would you please, please SHUT THE F**K UP!!"  (sorry, but being wide awake at 2 am makes me mean.) He finally got sick of it to the point that he moved to the couch- and I'd be fast asleep within five minutes. And once that happened several nights in a row, I got convinced that I could not fall asleep with him breathing beside me. Thus began the mind games that had me starting to worry about sleep at approximately 8 in the morning. And when you've psyched yourself out about it all day, there's no way you're going to sleep at night.  We started taking turns moving to the couch once I'd given up all hope of ever falling asleep beside him. And this sort of worked, but seriously, who wants to sleep every other night on the couch? It was time to bring out the big guns- a prescription for Ambien.

Oh Ambien, glorious Ambien. It works like a charm. Pop one of those babies, and 20 minutes later, I am gone. It is wonderful and I love it so much. Problem solved, right? Nope, not right at all. See, Ambien becomes less effective the more you take it. And if it stops working, I may as well give up on sleep for good. So I can't take it every night, lest it lose its magic powers. And the nights I don't take it are, if possible, even more miserable than before. Last night was one of them. Of course I couldn't fall asleep. I moved to the couch and spent an hour and a half trying to drift into dreamland. No dice- back to bed. I kicked and  hissed at Matt for an hour before kicking him out to the couch. (He went, but not without a few choice words. Can't say that I blame him.) And even once I had the whole bed to myself, and no one was breathing but me, it still took a while to fall into a restless, fitful sleep from which I woke after less than 2 1/2 hours.

So here I am, tiredly blogging in run-on sentences, already wondering how I'll sleep tonight. I'm hoping that sheer exhaustion will put me out without pharmaceutical help. But if not, I'll gladly drug myself into oblivion, because I can only go on like this for so long!