As the sun goes down.......

Nights for me can be the toughest. Yes, it seems to be when all the pain surfaces but it is the quieting of the mind that sometimes really gets to me. There is nothing but silence. You are alone with your thoughts about life and about your disease. The pain seems to creep up in the weirdest places and you sit there thinking......this pain is not caused by an infection it is caused by my own body!!!!!! That in itself is terrifying!!!!

You see, I was born into this body and I grew up in this body and now it is so ANGRY all the time!!!! I wish there were anger management classes for autoimmune diseases!!!! Boy do they need them! I don't know how many times I have read to treat your body like a temple....well, mine temple crumbled a long time ago!!!!!! So what do you do now???? Your body is angry, the temple has crumbled into dust and it is in the middle of the night. AMBIEN!!! Ok, there is a stigma when it comes to sleep aids..... no one wants to admit they are on them but everyone wants to have them. I guess I am kind of lucky. The doctor told me once to imagine myself with Lupus as a regular sized snowball. If you do not sleep one night and the next is restless you have started this chain reaction and it rolls and rolls down hill picking up steam as it goes and growing larger and larger. As you may have realized sleeping is one of the key ingredients to Feeling Well Soup! I am telling you from experience.....Feeling Well Soup is the best thing on the planet! For me Ambien helps sooooo much! 

They tell you that Lupus will cause you to feel a bit more tired than you normally would. Yeah right......again, feeling tired at the end of the day and wanting to relax is completely different than wanting to lay down in the middle of the grocery isle. No one told me that along with this utter exhaustion you would also loose the ability to sleep. Lupus patients are known to not be able to hit that deep REM sleep. It may be the pain, the disease itself or even being tooooooo tired. All I know is this was never fully explained and I still don't understand it. 

Let me tell you again.....AMBIEN......and when all else fails, turn over to your sound sleeping loved one and shake them until they wake up because I know when I can't sleep no one else in the world should be sleeping!!!!! Poor Timmy!!!!!