This has been a long, long, long week. I has felt like two weeks, not one, and I'll give you one guess why.
I cannot quite express how relieved I am to have Andy back and be able to share the load of three children being up in the night! I acknowledge that this is an unhelpful thought, but I do sometimes wonder how on earth I'm meant to get through my insomnia if the opportunity to sleep doesn't even present itself! But....in time, I know this will change.
During the course of the past week, something quite important has occurred to me. Many people that I know, good friends included, are unaware of this double existence that I lead. I know that just a handful of people read this blog and that's fine - I've always said that I write this primarily for myself. Whenever I have good days, the first thing I want to do is seize the day and get on with living my life and the last thing I want to do is ruminate on the why's and wherefores of my sleeplessness. But what this means is that I never (or rarely) get to talk about how I feel about it considering that on my bad days I can't (or won't) talk very much about anything. I don't answer the phone when people ring just to 'chat', because chatting is not what I feel like doing. But what I think I'm coming to realise (particularly following a really important conversation that Andy and I had in Devon) is that I need to talk about it on my good days as this is my only opportunity. I certainly don't have to go on and on about it or start wallowing in self-pity, I just need to offload a little. Offloading is not my strong point, certainly not orally. I've always relied on pen and paper (or blogging in more recent years) for that. But as invaluable as this is, it is not the same as talking. So, after that rather long ramble (I'm just trying to get my thoughts in order), what I think I'm trying to say to any of you reading this, when I next see you on a good day, please don't be afraid to ask how I really am. I may not be overly willing at first to talk about it, but I hope this will get better over time.
On another note entirely, I had to go to the GP a few weeks ago for something unrelated and I happened to mention a letter I'd received , quite mysteriously, saying that my blood test results (which blood tests?) showed I have low Vitamin B12 levels. Now this is hardly surprising considering I eat little meat and have Crohn's disease, recessive though it may be. Now I also mentioned my insomnia to this GP, to which he looked at me and said 'Oh, well that's probably because you have low Vitamin B12.' I wanted to say to him 'Hang on just one minute, you can't just explain away five years of insomnia in a simple statement like that.' But I didn't. What I did was sit there and think, my God, this may not be connected in the slightest BUT....it may be. I've been scouring the internet since then for information on possible links and found very little, but last week I had more blood taken to ascertain exactly how low the B12 is, and then depending on the results I may have injections combined with eating very rich B12 foods (I've already started the latter). What I don't want and can't do is start pinning my hopes on this as the cure for my insomnia, BUT the fact remains that I have low levels of B12 and, having done some reading on this, it's an incredibly important vitamin. I'll report back next week after I get my blood test results.
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