Restless Sleep

I wrote a couple of postings ago about being prescribed trazadone for insomnia. It is an anti-depressant that is also prescribed as a sedative. You can take 50 up to 100 mg per dose if you use it as a sedative and I definitely have to take the higher dose. It does work. There is one side effect that can be a bit aggravating especially as it intensifies a characteristic I’ve had all my life.

I have restless feet, and legs and hands. I have had this all my life. I am sure that if I were growing up today, I would be diagnosed as hyperactive or ADD or whatever the current fashionable term is. When I was about 14 my younger brother was diagnosed with ADD by the family doctor. When he asked my mother if she hadn’t noticed that he was a bit over-energetic and hard to control, she said, “Oh no, I have another one just like him at home.” Whenever I sit down, my feet are tapping, or my knees are jiggling and it goes on 24 hours a day.

I did not know that I did it at night until I was 18. Three high school buddies and I drove to Mexico City from Minneapolis to visit one of the guy’s uncles. That is an innocuous sounding statement until you realize that it is about 2500 miles, 4 guys in one car, driving straight through until we got there. We were young…

The first night we were in Mexico City, we were all bunked in one large room. The next morning, my three friends looked bleary-eyed and haggard. They had been awakened all night long by the sound of my feet rubbing together under the sheets. They thought it might be mice or bugs and it was not for several hours that they traced the noise to my feet. They could not believe that I could sleep through the noise I was making. I was exiled to a small room next door for the duration of our visit.

Trazadone makes my legs jumpy. It doesn’t happen till about 30 minutes after I take it, then it sets in. There is a strange feeling of tension build up in my leg and then it twitches sharply. This goes on until I fall asleep. When I took 50 mg, the jumpy leg defeated the sedative, but when I went to 100 mg. the sedative effect put me to sleep despite the twitching. Luckily for me, and more notably my wife, the twitching subsides shortly after I fall asleep and reverts back to my normal foot rubbing. I can usually get a reasonable night’s sleep after taking it without feeling logy in the morning.

One small, twitchy, step against side effects, one great leap for enduring treatment…