Doctor's Tough Love

[rthom]

Good that she is going for help, It must be hard for them sometimes to tell us everything if they think it can't be as big a deal as our roblems or if they do not want to worry us.

[EeFall]

Good that she is going for help, It must be hard for them sometimes to tell us everything if they think it can't be as big a deal as our roblems or if they do not want to worry us.

Very true rthom.

[EeFall]

Hope it helps you. It definitely does me. Like I said, I take only 1/4, so it's not a big effect, but it is enough that I was able to stay alert during meetings. I wasn't that tired, though. If I were really tired, I'd definitely take 1/2 and see what happened.

OMG thank you for suggesting 1/2 first time I haven't felt this normal for years except 1/4 would have been okay like you said. I have had almost too much energy, took it at 8:30 am and still going strong at 4:30 pm. Hope I can sleep, if so this Nuvigil will change my life for the good! Keep your fingers crossed for me, staying up all night would not be a good thing but taking it everyday to be awake and normal would be awesome. Thanks for mentioning it to me!!!

[ViewsAskew]

Hope it helps you. It definitely does me. Like I said, I take only 1/4, so it's not a big effect, but it is enough that I was able to stay alert during meetings. I wasn't that tired, though. If I were really tired, I'd definitely take 1/2 and see what happened.

OMG thank you for suggesting 1/2 first time I haven't felt this normal for years except 1/4 would have been okay like you said. I have had almost too much energy, took it at 8:30 am and still going strong at 4:30 pm. Hope I can sleep, if so this Nuvigil will change my life for the good! Keep your fingers crossed for me, staying up all night would not be a good thing but taking it everyday to be awake and normal would be awesome. Thanks for mentioning it to me!!!

I don't think that we hear about it much because the vast majority of us are treated successfully with a DA or by managing symptoms, so we don't need it. But for those on the other end of the spectrum, I think we should investigate the Nuvigil/Provigil drugs more often. I am trying to only take mine when I have face-to-face meetings, but bet I'd do better day-to-day if I took it even when working at home.

I'm so glad it's helping you.

[EeFall]

It is 11:30 pm and I'm still going full bore I have to think I'm probably not sleeping tonight. Usually this would suck big time but I feel good. It is not like I am pacing back and forth I'm sitting here with my laptop on a couch recliner and feel great. I might go to work with zero sleep or I might call in sick, don't know yet. I could still sleep I suppose, but will have to wait and see. I'm still glad I took a 1/2 tab. One tab would have made me a space cadet and I would probably be rocketing to the moon by now and a 1/4 tab probably would have been fine, and that is what I will be taking when I need them at work. I will also only take them if I need them but I am afraid that might be everyday.

The first 30 day supple was free with coupon or would have been $128 according to my wife (although we just found out the insurance will pay for them for a year except for co-pay of $5 I think). I guess they are trying to get people to try them and I can see why. It is the strange thing that you hear about some folks like rock stars and the like that end up taking drugs to stay up in the day and to sleep at night. I never thought I would be in that situation but here I am. Normal people won't understand it and many with WED might not either but I am NEVER normal.

The best I can get to being there is something like Nuvigil/Provigil during the day to keep me awake from having to take Methadone and Lyrica throughout the day and night so I don't have to pace. Then I have my nighttime miracle drug Mirapex (the generic form though) that allows me to sleep (if I get to sleep) on average about 3 hours a night of pretty crummy restless sleep hooked up to a VPAP machine to correct obstructive sleep apnea and central apnea...but you know I would give pretty much anything I have if it would continue like that, because I could live a pretty normal life that way, hard to believe but true.

The problem is that every so often, maybe next week, next month, or 6 months, I don't know. The whole drug cocktail thing will stop working. It is so profoundly incredibly bizarre that I wouldn't believe it had it not happened to me now a zillion times. Just as I think everything is going good - zap! The guys up there on Mount Olympus (fate, God, life, whatever) throw a lightening bolt at me (not far from the truth as the jolt of RLS feels like that to me sometimes) and I fall flat on face into some muck. I go into this period where I don't sleep for a few days and my thinking becomes foggy and I don't seek help because it feels like I have been that way for a million years. Finally I figure out that I'm down in the hole again, the meds aren't working and I go to the doctor.

This last time though he basically said live with it, maybe a new drug will come out that will help you in the future. Holy crap Batman! I get enough zaps from Mount Olympus and a mortal zaps me too??? It is too funny. One has to laugh at the total absurdity of it all. I mean many people have terrible things wrong with them and suffer agonizing pain, they have such bad lives, I sort of feel lucky in a way. At least drugs sometimes make it almost normal. The majority of people do live pretty good lives though, as far as health. I envy them.

My wife and/or I have had computers since 1980. Our first laptop was in about 1996. Since then we have always had his and her laptops I have been backing up all of those desktops and laptops so that I have files back probably to around 1980, at the first. I have a 2 terabyte external hard drive that has everything on it, everything backed up. My computer motherboard went out the other day so I pulled this old laptop out and got it working again. Can't afford another computer at the moment. This computer was incredibly for its time 2.8 ghz Pentium 4 with a lot of goodies. Now though the new programs tax its 1gb memory. I went in and put up the virtual ram to the max to that I have 4gb virtual plus the 1gb RAM.

At the same time another drive came up on the screen for virtual ram and it was my external hard drive. For some really stupid reason I will never be able to explain I had it go in and see if it could add virtual ram to it. Maybe I was thinking each hard drive could then be using virtual ram, I don't know. What I did do was take a hard drive that had been setup in Vista and updated to Windows 7 and have Windows XP that I have on this laptop change the hard drive index, more like write over it. I then used a program that wanted to backup to the hard drive and it said the hard drive needed to be formatted first before it could be used, would you like to format the hard drive (where everything you ever wrote or did or collected on the computers for the past 30 some years resided). I'm like what in the hell do you mean it needs to be formatted! It has 660 gigabytes of my life tucked away in it.

I just sat here and started sobbing (partly from the drugs no doubt), a grown man. My wife is asking me what is wrong. After I could talk I told her I had lost everything on the external drive. She didn't understand - yet. I then said we have lost all of the pictures and movies that we have taken for the last 20 some years! The books I have written, all of our financial records - everything! Then she understood. I swear that just yesterday we were talking about backing everything up on a cloud. We were going to use Carbonite, a pretty big company now that does that. That way we would never totally lose all our data.

We spent the next few hours doing other things, I just couldn't even think about it. Finally I went back at it and tried many ways to get back into the external hard drive but nothing recognized it. Finally I opened a DOS window and started playing around with the commands and it started to come back to me. I learned DOS before Window 3.0, I thought Windows 3.2 was so cool! Anyways it wouldn't go to the E drive where it would be. Then I typed chkdsk E: and the screen went blank for a few minutes and then started talking about the E drive. It actually told me that it could have fixed an error if I would have used /f (which means fix ). So then I tried it with that command and it said some other program was in use and it wouldn't work, that it would do it at the next start up. I turned off the computer and rebooted and I held my breath. Damn! It started fixing the C drive!

I was just so ticked off you wouldn't believe it. It went through the whole drive and I think it actually improved it but all our files were still gone. When it loaded this time I went directly to the DOS window and typed in the command to look at the E drive and fix it. It worked! After several minutes it said it had fixed several things. I opened another DOS window and typed in CD E: and instead of going back to C:, it actually went to E:, I then typed in DIR for a directory list and it worked. I went to the Windows XP window and opened up the drive and everything was there and accessibly. Man I was so happy. The whole thing started because I needed more memory to get to a to do list that I created in Excel that now wouldn't work on my old computer because it cannot recognize the new Excel format.

By the way, I downloaded OpenOffice from the Internet and it opened the file! OpenOffice is an open source application that totally replaces Microsoft Office. It has 6 different very familiar office applications which look very good in Windows XP but can be put on even Windows 7. I was just looking for something that would open my to do list and found that awesome software that will allow me to continue to use this old laptop.

I have been writing this for over an hour obviously the Nuvigil is still working

Another thing about this stupid hard drive story. Guess what I purchased after having thought I lost everything on my hard drive? I am now an official member of Carbonite and they are in the process of backing up my laptop and my external hard drive. I don't want to ever have to worry about losing everything ever again! Good night to you, if you can sleep, I will most likely watch the sun rise in a few hours. Later.

[ViewsAskew]

Hubby has degrees in electrical and computer engineering. He did a similar thing once - don't remember the details, just the panic and then the relief. He was distracted when he chose an option - and he never does stuff like that, unlike me - and he still screwed up. Woe to those of us sleep impaired!

I don't think anyone realizes just how much of your life you lose when something like this happens. Nor do so many of us realize how easy it is to be compromised, to have a hard drive failure, or to get a virus if you're not extremely careful.

Glad you got it all back.

[EeFall]

Hubby has degrees in electrical and computer engineering. He did a similar thing once - don't remember the details, just the panic and then the relief. He was distracted when he chose an option - and he never does stuff like that, unlike me - and he still screwed up. Woe to those of us sleep impaired!

I don't think anyone realizes just how much of your life you lose when something like this happens. Nor do so many of us realize how easy it is to be compromised, to have a hard drive failure, or to get a virus if you're not extremely careful.

Glad you got it all back.

Any place else I would find it unusual to see a post so late from Chicago Panic/relief yes! My other 2 options I had been thinking about was to download an online program, I know they are out there, that can sometimes fix hard drive problems like that, and then the last choice was something I had almost done once - send the drive to a place that specializes in getting the info back. I was going to do it for a laptop drive once but they wanted hundreds of dollars. This time I would have paid, just too many memories would have been gone. Pictures and movies alone would have been a big loss, but I also have things like the original Doom game, Wolfenstein, all the games for PlayStation, Genesis, Super Nintendo, NeoGeo, Intelivision...Duke Nukem!

[EeFall]

Okay it is official, I'm staying home today. Not only did I not sleep - I went to bed for about 10 seconds and shot straight up out of bed - but around 4 am I got terrible RLS symptoms in my whole body my arms were thrashing around like arms thrashing around and I couldn't even sit at the computer. I finally realized that I needed to take my 5:30 am meds early and I was okay again within 45 minutes or so. I just had a cup of coffee and I am pretending I just got up. I really don't feel bad now, except more druggy than usual.

Tomorrow when I go back to work I am going to take with me two 1/8 tabs of Nuvigil. I'll take an 1/8 and see how it is. Man that stuff is STRONG, I can only imagine what might have happened had I taken a whole tab. ViewsAskew saved me from making that mistake. I know it is just a matter of getting the right dose because they really work to normalize me as in not being tired at all and giving me energy to get things done during the day.

I just got iTunes installed on my new old computer. This laptop is getting better and better. It is a Pentium 4, 2.8ghz and was really powerful in its day. Putting the virtual memory up has really helped with running the newer programs that probably assume a computer has at least 3 or 4gb of memory. This thing has 1gb and I don't think it can be upgraded but I will see. Also the battery is 99% dead. I took it out to save weight cause I thought it was dead but found out real fast it is still working a little. When I turned it off and then back on the computer thought it was back in 2002 and wouldn't run some programs because the date was wrong. The battery works enough to keep the date going.

[rthom]

Humm, was looking at your replies since 5:30 and don't see mine---Unfortunately, I can't remember what all I had written, happens once in a while, seems if you post at the same time someone else does it can just go missing. Anyway, sorry your night was so bad and what a computer mess!! My son is taking it in college--so maybe one day I'll understand more of it but right now it's a dunngh thing. Glad it's looking better. Good luck tonight!

[EeFall]

The strange thing is that I haven't fallen asleep the whole day. I mean I think this Nuvigil has been affecting me now for going on 32 hours, I don't see how that is possible, but I think it must be. Maybe tomorrow at work I will just take out the pill and look at it, probably would be good for a few hours...

[EeFall]

I am hearing things. I hear music in the background but there is no music playing. Last night that happened but nothing like right now. It is getting fairly loud. Wow, I guess getting 3 hours of sleep a night and then going to nothing has about put me over the edge. My wife won't be home for a few hours, this is starting to freak me out a bit. I am hearing people yelling over the music (that isn't there either). Now I hear the washer and/or dryer on but they are not. The thing is I can usually ignore this kind of stuff but it is more real than my normal lack of sleep hallucinations. I'm going to go investigate all the noises, now I know I am letting it get to me.

[ViewsAskew]

Sounds pretty crazy! I don't know the diff between Nuvigil and Provigil...nothing like this has happened to me yet.

Go to your friendly search engine and type in Nuvigil hallucinations - much to read .

[EeFall]

Now I am much better, I now experienced an earthquake. I have been through a 6.7 earthquake, and this one was so incredible because it wasn't real...don't confuse me with facts. Facts are the hallllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllAs I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted by non-realityllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllWhat in the hell was that noise? Losingit bluesllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssI want a speaker sound system for my tvkdddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd;freaking cow bell woke me up just now ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddexcuse me I keep falling asleep I'm a little rs I don't know for sure but this feelsa little like hell to me. Gotta get up and walk around

[rthom]

maybe you should talk to someone--a friend, dr, wife home soon?

[rthom]

I'm on and I answer PM's so if you want to yak for a bit send me one--I always answer Pm's first. We're here with/for you