An Insomnia Story

Have you ever wished you could have more hours in a day? Well, now you can!

What's the secret, you ask? Just a little thing called Insomnia!

The average human spends 1/3 of her life sleeping! What a waste! With Insomnia, you can go from spending 8 hours a night snoring away, to 20+ hours a day wide awake, completely unable to function because you've done away with that boring thing called sleep!

Try Insomnia, and you will see: your energy levels plummet! Your cognitive ability regress to a fourth-grade level! Your mood hit an unfathomably new low! Your every daily activity become 20 times harder! And much, much more!

If you're interested in Insomnia, it's easy to get started—just subject yourself to a minor stressful life event and lose some sleep over it! It's that simple! Before you know it, you'll be on your way to months or years of intractable sleeplessness! And this can all be yours, for the low, low cost of your last shred of sanity!

DON'T WAIT! CALL TODAY!

Hello, friends, family, and fellow denizens of the Internet. I hope you enjoyed my little commercial and have decided Insomnia is right for you, because misery loves company, and there are a lot of miserable insomniacs out there who would love you to join their ranks. I myself have insomnia (temporarily! You'll soon learn why I say that) and felt it was time to process the experience in the way I know best: by blogging!

Insomnia (which is, in a nutshell, an inability to get satisfying amounts or quality of sleep) is literally an epidemic in the United States. They say that anywhere from 10-60% of people live with some form of chronic insomnia. When I speak of chronic insomnia, I don't mean an occasional night of trouble getting to sleep, but rather the long-term, life-destroying form of the ailment (though the word "insomnia" can be used to mean any trouble sleeping, even for one night, in my writing I'll be using it as shorthand for "chronic insomnia").

When I was a new insomniac, I searched the Internet for stories, maybe reassurance that my feelings were normal and I wasn't completely alone, but I found almost nothing. If 10% of the US population has chronic insomnia, and the US population numbers 328 million, then at least 32 million Americans are dealing with chronic insomnia at this moment! Where are all their stories? I don't know, but I'm going to share mine. Hopefully the next poor soul struggling through another sleep-deprived day will run across this one and feel slightly less alone.

It's a good thing this blog already has a celestial theme, because my nocturnal issues are going to be its new biggest subject. I'm going to talk your ear off about insomnia, including my personal anecdotes, and maybe those of insomnia sufferers I've met along the way! I hope you're ready for a long-winded discussion on everything related to insomnia—if you're not, at least I hope I can bore you to sleep!

Immune Defense Day

Apparently a year of avoiding all potentially pathogenic human contact has completely crippled my immune system, because as soon as I started leaving the house with no mask on, I caught a cold. And as soon as I recovered from that cold, I caught another one.

It is now Independence Day—a day for socializing and celebration—and I am holed up in my house with 120mg of pseudoephedrine coursing through my veins and a mean mood.

There are a lot of things I could have been doing today. I could have gone down to celebrate with a friend in Charlottesville. I could have gone out to celebrate with a different friend in Annapolis. I could have met another friend to watch the fireworks in Alexandria. I could have gone to an EDM party in DC. I could have accepted the invitation to go have sex with this one guy I met 3 months ago on a dating app (um, no thanks?). 

I could have done any of those things. But because I was unwell, I chose to stay home. Now let's be clear, I'm not that sick. I spent the morning mopping my floors. I could easily dance a jig and do a couple of cartwheels and not get winded. I'm not staying home because I feel like death; I'm doing it because it's the right thing to do.

If there was one thing that I thought we all learned throughout this year-long-and-still-strong pandemic, is that you don't go out when you're sick! It doesn't matter if your symptoms are mild, or if you have a really important deadline, or you don't want to miss out on the most epic party of your week. It's not a badge of honor to power through your illness, shedding viruses to all and sundry—if you have a transmissible infection, you owe it to your fellow humans not to spread it around!

Apparently, though, it seems that many people didn't get the memo. The fact that I caught two colds in two weeks is a strong indicator that there are plenty out there who are more than willing to go out and share their viral wealth. 

When I informed one person that I'd be staying home today due to my illness, he told me to come out anyway because a margarita would make me feel better (first off, factually wrong! Second off, it's not about how I feel; it's about protecting other people from having to feel the same way). When I declined on the grounds that "I prefer to not spread my germs all across creation," he continued to push the issue. 

Don't be that guy! If someone you know wants to keep their distance in the interest of public health, just let them! And if you yourself are mildly ill and on the fence about whether to play it safe or go to town, just play it safe!

"It's just a cold" is not a legitimate excuse to willingly expose other people to illness! If there's anything we learned from the wide variability in COVID effects (ranging from completely asymptomatic all the way to death), it's that infections can affect different people in different ways. What's just a cold to you could possibly kill the next person to catch it!

I'm staying home today. I'm eating ice cream alone and getting takeout for dinner and showing off my patriotic pedicure to my dog. And I'm writing a grumpy rant on my blog. If you want me to feel better, don't try to coax me into drinking margaritas; just promise me that the next time you get sick, you won't let it spread any farther. Tell me that you've learned the lesson that could stop the next pandemic. Just tell me, if you're sick, you'll stay home!

This post needed a picture, and my patriotic pedicure needed a wider audience than just one dog!

The Hairy Eyeball

Lately, I've been having this problem with scratchiness in my eye. It's not dryness. It's not itchiness. It feels like something is stuck in it, but no matter what I do, I can't get it out! Rubbing it accomplishes nothing (I know I'm not supposed to do that anyway). Blinking just makes it worse. Dousing it with eyedrops doesn't help. I'm simply forced to deal with it, blinking uncomfortably and tossing my head around like I can maybe shake the irritant loose, for hours or days until it finally, miraculously, goes away.

I thought this was just another one of those weird malfunctions of my body, like eczema, an extreme reaction to an imagined slight (or maybe my mascara, though it never seemed to coincide with the relatively infrequent times I wore makeup). I put up with the phenomenon for months, getting annoyed every time it recurred, but figuring it was just the latest in a lifelong string of weird but minor health problems that can't be treated.

Then one day, during a particularly irritating bout of scratchy eye, I went in the bathroom and got up close and personal with my eyeball, pulling back the lids and scrutinizing the sclera for any signs of injury. I didn't see anything...until...there! The tiniest...something...that didn't look like it was part of my eye. It vanished when I blinked, and then it appeared again. I poked it with my finger, brushed sideways, pulled outward, and I had it!

It unraveled from my eye like a skein of thread. It was kinky and fine as silk, almost invisible but most definitely not imagined.

It was a dog hair. One of those tiny, twisty undercoat hairs that adhere to every soft surface in our house and refuse to come off again. This time, the surface it adhered to was my eyeball.

So you know what I'm talking about, here's an example hair,
which, fortunately, has never been stuck in my eye.

One more medical mystery, solved!

Since that moment, I've had two more cases of scratchy eye that have been successfully cured by close examination and subsequent removal of a dog hair.

If I had one of those automatic fur removers that hasn't been invented yet, it would sure save me a lot of literal tears. But at least I'm glad to know that there's a cause and a solution to one of the most infuriating maladies to affect me in recent history. And fellow dog owners, if you ever experience a scratchy eye for no apparent reason, perhaps you should look not to yourself for the cause, but to your pet!

The nose doesn't know

In case you were concerned for my health after my lengthy bout of travelers' ailments, I am pleased to announce that it has improved greatly...in some respects.

For the past couple days, instead of hacking my lungs out every hour on the hour, I content myself with a little conservative wheezing at bedtime and a hearty amount of messy throat-clearing coughs when I get up. Then I'm more or less good for the rest of the day.

But if you thought I was in the clear, oh ho no! How naive!

The day I returned to Maryland from Hawaii, I felt my nose begin to get stuffed up. At this point, I'm pretty certain that late May in Maryland produces some kind of allergen that apparently only affects me. It seems like my worst stuffy noses always appear around this time. But most of the time, I'm either traveling or returning from travel, so I'm never quite sure if it's just the change of environment that sets it off.

In any case, this time, aggressive treatment with nasal steroids and antihistamines and decongestant pills kept my nose from ever getting completely blocked (thank heavens; usually I have to resort to the oxymetazoline spray, but I guess I got it early enough this time!), but I've been drug-dependent for almost a week now.

On Sunday night, the first day I felt confident enough to stop taking decongestants, I was eating my favorite food – cookie dough – when I noticed it tasted like nothing at all. I realized something unusual that has never happened to me before: while I could still breathe through my nose, I had lost my sense of smell!

Monday morning, upon waking, I still couldn't smell a blasted thing, so I reluctantly took another decongestant and soon was smelling the roses again (and the strawberries, and the flour, and all the other ingredients I put into my cookie batter that I was actually, for a change, going to cook!).

However, by evening, again sitting down to eat cookie dough, I found it utterly flavorless—again!

This morning, still experiencing the world in a state of olfactory blindness, I decided to try out my neti pot again (it's never seemed to help much with my congestion) and zapped my nose with a new bottle (not expired, as have been the last two I used) of fluticasone.

And then I could smell – sort of – for most of the day.

I bet you can guess what happened next—I couldn't smell anything again. And then I could. And then I couldn't. And then I could. I believe my sense of smell will eventually return to its pre-infection state of virtuosity (I've actually become quite proud of my sense of smell in recent times, since I spent my formative years with chronic congestion barely ever smelling anything), but in the meantime, I'm pretty excited whenever I get to smell anything. The scent of baking asphalt? Woohoo! A fart? That's great! Any terrible smell is better than being deprived of the most underrated of senses!

That thing I call labyrinthitis

It's been over a year since I wrote about labyrinthitis—the affliction that caused me to feel spacey, dizzy, and out-of-it for several weeks running last winter. I call it labyrinthitis, as a kind of working title, though really I'm still not sure that's what it is. What it is, is just an odd feeling of being  disconnected from reality. It's sort of like being mildly drunk, without the accompanying mood lift.

Though I haven't brought it up much here, it brings itself up often enough. In the past year, every time I've caught a cold, I've ended up with some degree of spaciness about a week later. I had a cold last week, and I'm experiencing it right now. I'm used to it now, so it's not as scary as it was the first time, but it is undeniably annoying. 

It takes away my appetite. It ruins my ability to concentrate. It makes me feel sleepy all the time, even when I'm not remotely tired. It is, in short, a minor annoyance that becomes a major distraction. But never fear—I think I know how to beat it!

I think it's triggered by dextromethorphan, the cough suppressant!

I'd never before felt like this after a cold, until that epic coughing cold last January. It's a good thing I like to blog about my sorrows, because reading my posts from that time is giving me all sorts of vital information about my actions and symptoms, which I can compare to what I'm going through right now.

Early last week, when I was still in the feverish stages of my cold, I was trying to avoid getting one of my Stuffy Noses from Hell, so I took a 12-hour decongestant pill in the evening, then before bed, I took a 12-hour cough suppressant pill. Then I tossed and turned all night, unable to sleep even a wink! And lo, about a week into my infamous cold of last year, I had a similar experience of sleeplessness after consuming cough syrup and decongestants.

The plot thickens! The next day (last year) I was in what I called "zombie mode." I attributed it then to lack of sleep, but later I realized it might have been the first onset of my own special brand of "labyrinthitis." Similarly, a few days ago, the day after the night I couldn't sleep, I also spent the day fully awake but spacey and like a zombie. I attributed that feeling to lack of sleep too, but I marveled to myself how similar sleep deprivation feels to my labyrinthitis. Is it really a coincidence? Or was that spacey feeling actually a side effect of the dextromethorphan? Recreational users refer to this drug as DXM, and for the sake of brevity, so will I.

This week and last, I've only taken a cough suppressant twice—the night that I couldn't sleep, and last night. And both times, I've spent the next day in a stupor, regardless of how much sleep I'd gotten. Last night, I slept just fine. I think maybe it's the combination of DXM and pseudoephedrine that keeps me up all night, but the DXM alone makes me spacey. Last year was the first time I ever took cough suppressants, and I really went on a spree—I believe I referred to myself around that time as "swilling" cough syrup. So if indeed the DXM was in some way responsible for my spaciness, it's no surprise that it took me weeks to get over its effects.

If I can avoid labyrinthitis (or whatever that weird feeling is) just by avoiding cough suppressants, I'm all for it. I hear honey is just as effective. But I'll have to wait until the next time I get a cold to find out...and if I never get another cold again, I won't mind missing out on that learning experience.

Weekend Whining

Two weeks and a weekend into this illness, I've had enough with a capital nough. The thought of never recovering is filling me with dread. Sometimes panic. And I think panic, in general, is not conducive to recovery.

I am already annoyed at how boring I've become. I've withdrawn from my skating lessons. I skipped a hockey game and two parties this weekend (narrowly escaping the Super Bowl for another year) and reluctantly attended a third, at which I sat nervously and refused all desserts and generally made myself out to be a loser. I was also doped up on meclizine, which delivered its promised drowsiness nearly 6 hours after ingestion, inconveniently right after I arrived at the party.

My hobbies have dwindled down to one—listening to Cloud Atlas on my cell phone, which is probably for the better because I borrowed this particular audiobook from the library (digitally) and I only have a few more days until I have to "return" it. Oh, and also blogging blind—thankfully this is not too difficult since my touch typing skills are prodigious, if I do say so myself (and heck, I might as well let myself feel good about something, cause otherwise I would be a negative Nancy indeed).

I have attempted numerous times to get  some sort of screen reader software so I can listen to web pages, rather than look at them, which makes my eyes go all wonky. I have learned the utmost empathy for people with visual disabilities, as what I've found thus far has been disappointing bordering on maddening. Stop reading the HTML markup! Stop telling me no text is selected when it is! Stop insisting on reading the quotation marks aloud but not the ampersands! Stop talking like a robot! Et cetera, et cetera.

All the craft projects I've been wanting to do are just sitting in a pile waiting for me to have the fortitude to attempt them. My usually impeccable (though often unfashionable) sense of style has taken a hit, as staring into my closet and trying on endless combinations of clothes is too wearing (get it?) for my brain. I turned down one freelance gig already, and I look ahead with complete unenthusiasm to the one I'm already obligated to do. I paid my bills late, because I couldn't seem to find the time for them in between sprees of sitting in the darkness, thus labyrinthitis  is already costing me pennies upon pennies in overdue fees.

Not to mention the doctor visits, of which there have already been 2, going on  a third, and the prescription, which I probably won't bother to refill.

This weekend was something of a tease, as there were huge swathes of Saturday in which I felt disconcertingly normal, only to have the dizziness come back in several annoying swoops. This morning, I am definitely back to square one. The only difference between the way I felt at the onset of this condition and the way I feel now is that now I'm additionally enjoying occasional motion sickness and headaches. Oh, and originally I would feel better if I closed my eyes; now, sometimes, that makes it feel worse! My consolation is that sometimes I feel like it is easing up, or even occasionally going away completely, so maybe I'm not doomed to a life of dizziness.

Labyrinthitis

Here's a funny story about hypochondria: while I was busy barking up the whooping cough tree, I completely missed a legitimate illness that was right under my nose. Here are the clues, extracted directly from my recent blog posts:

"I was too tired to focus my eyes."
"My eyes wouldn't work properly, and I couldn't concentrate worth a hoot."
"in what could now be called full-on zombie mode."
"I am in a constant stupor."

I've saved you the suspense of guessing what was wrong with me by conveniently titling this post with its name, but if you want to play along, here's the story of how I finally clued in to the fact that something was amiss.

By last Wednesday morning (that's 4 days after the onset of symptoms), I had finally gotten a full night of sleep. Yet still, I had this weird disconcerting feeling of being in a dream. It was hard to put my finger on what was wrong, but things just didn't look right to me, like there was a discrepancy between what my eyes were seeing and what my brain was registering. The best way I could describe it was feeling "spacey."

The symptoms were really vague and very subtle, but after days of scrutinizing them, I concluded:

• Feeling spacey is the primary symptom.
• At times, when it gets bad, I notice things look like they're subtly rocking, vibrating, or bouncing, and I can feel a faint sensation of the same if I close my eyes.
• It gets worse in the evenings and after being active.
• Bright light seems to make it worse—staring at a computer monitor is no fun whatsoever, but oddly, if I get really close to the monitor while reading, I almost feel normal.
• I have had little to no appetite and on bad days I'm downright nauseated.

Like any good hypochondriac, I turned to the Internet for a diagnosis. What I found was a disturbing number of people who developed the same symptoms mysteriously and never lost them, spending years in a state of unreality. Some people got this way after a neck injury that somehow affected blood flow to their brain. Others just woke up that way one morning. I discovered some migraine sufferers experience similar symptoms, and I spent a day believing I had some incredibly long-lasting migraine.

By Thursday afternoon, I had changed my self-diagnosis to labyrinthitis, based on the fact that it's a fairly common condition that often arises after an upper respiratory infection, which I had just had. On the next Tuesday morning (yesterday, and, if you're counting, 11 days after the first appearance of symptoms), I went to the doctor, who also diagnosed labyrinthitis without any prompting from me.

He said some things that were reassuring and some things that were not: For example, people usually get better on their own, but it was a little unusual that I wasn't getting better yet. He also noted that usually labyrinthitis causes a spinning sensation, so my spaciness and occasional rocking feeling are not exactly par for the course.

To me, this says we're either wrong and there's something else going on entirely, or I'm just a weird bird who can never do anything the normal way. He says if it doesn't improve, he recommends I see an ENT in DC who specializes in vertigo.

Insert witty conclusion here while I go to bed. My eyes are tired.

Confessions of a Hypochondriac: The Whooping Cough Episode

Worrying about my health is something I'm good at, having had a whole lifetime of experience. I've believed I had everything from a heart attack (at the ripe old age of 10) to pancreatic cancer to kidney failure to bowel obstruction.

I never go to the doctor and just say, "Help, I have a cough." No, I go to the doctor and say, "Help, I'm afraid I have whooping cough."

That's the most recent case of hypochondria. I blame my own self. Jestingly using the phrase "whooping it up" in my last blog post as a humorous substitute for "coughing," I unwittingly started an avalanche. Before long, I was thinking of the article I read a few weeks ago, by a sufferer of the ailment, bitterly blaming the parents who chose not to vaccinate their children. Whooping cough (aka pertussis) is becoming more widespread in recent years, and the vaccine I received as a child would have worn off by now. I wonder, as I wheeze in my bed by the light of the moon, what whooping cough feels like. Ah, the Internet can tell me!

By the next day, I am convinced I have whooping cough. At least, there's nothing I've read to indicate I don't. In its early stages, pertussis is just like a cold, developing into an "unremarkable," "occasional," "dry" cough, which is just like mine! After five nights predominated by coughing, I am in a constant stupor from the sleep deprivation (or maybe that's another symptom of my illness). I have to see the doctor!

Never mind that almost everyone in my office got sick at the same time, and they've all mostly recovered. Never mind that everyone around me is coughing like it's Beijing or something. Surely my cough is different, worse, and whooping.

I tell the doctor, half ashamed because I know she's going to think I'm a crackpot and probably post cartoons about me on Facebook, but at the same time I'm not ashamed enough to sweep my fears under the rug. She says, "I don't think you have whooping cough. I haven't heard you cough once since you've been here, and usually whooping cough is continuous." Well, actually, the things I read on the Internet say that most adults with whooping cough only have spells once in a while, but I just nod that she's right. "And," she continues, "Usually whooping cough is not just a tickle in the throat. It's usually a deep chest cough."

I say, sheepishly, "Well, they say it takes about two weeks to get to that stage. I'm worried I just haven't gotten there yet."

She humors me by giving me a prescription for azithromycin, but tells me to first take my nasal steroids for a few days, because she thinks I probably just have irritation from post-nasal drip. I thank her from my heart. She doesn't believe my suspicions, but she's given me what I need to stop worrying.

And it turns out, she was right. I did not have whooping cough. That day, I went to the drugstore and picked up a longer-lasting cough suppressant, took it that night, and my cough pretty much had disappeared by the next day. But what she didn't know was that I had something much more insidious to worry about! Stay tuned for the next installment in this thrilling medical drama.

Can't Get No Sleep

I've always had trouble falling asleep, but I've been taking it to a whole new level this week. I got a cold last Sunday, and about 2 days into it (when the respiratory symptoms caught up with the general malaise) I started having trouble sleeping. Wednesday and Thursday nights were mildly restless, but not enough to make me tired at work. Friday I went out with some friends and got home late.  I slept great that night, but I still missed out on a couple hours of sleep and probably reactivated my cold a little. I was kind of in low-grade zombie mode all Saturday, which was fine because all I had to do was run a few errands in the morning and chug cough syrup the rest of the day.

Cough syrup is an experiment for me. I've never really used it before, mainly because the thought of swilling some sugary concoction of chemicals makes me want to gag, and I prefer doing things the natural way (for the record, slippery elm doesn't help). But after whooping it up for the past couple of days, I decided to bite the bullet and bought some sugar-free Robitussin. It was still nasty. Wish I could have just found it in pill form. But anyway, I think it helped. At least, there were a few hours between doses where I didn't feel the need to cough. But right after each dose was usually, for some reason, a coughing frenzy. Probably the gag reflex kicking in.

Anyway, round about 10:00, I realized I was too tired to focus my eyes, so I got myself into bed and prepared for a nice heavy sleep. The kind I usually get when I've been sleep deprived.

But this time as soon as my head hit the pillow, the tickle in my throat came back with a vengeance! I had brought the cough syrup into bed with me, so I just poured a dose, convulsed for a few minutes, and finally calmed down. Then I tossed and turned for a while and realized that I was feeling restless. I blamed it on the Sudafed. It wasn't supposed to wear off until around 4am, so I prepared for a few uncomfortable hours. It might have been the cough syrup, though. Or the combination.

But then, despite the long-lasting effects of the Sudafed on my sleep, it hadn't worked so well on my congestion. Part of my nose was stuffy, and it was extremely distracting! I had also brought my decongestant spray into bed with me (it works better than Sudafed), so took a few hits of that and lay back down.

Then, at 11, I got a text message! My Airbnb houseguests wanted to know if they could extend their stay another night! I had to rouse myself, check to make sure no one else had booked for the following night, and then let them know they were free to book. Later (too much later), while I was still semi-conscious, they finally made the booking, resulting in another text message at 12:40 and me having to get up again, visit Airbnb and approve their request.

At this point, I realized I was going to need some help, so I opened my old sleep hypnosis app. I don't know why I bother with it, because it never works. I have a very low susceptibility to hypnosis. So then I went on to progressive muscle relaxation.

After that, I might have even dozed a bit, but I know I checked my phone at 2:24 am, because I was getting that throat tickle again and wanted to know if it was time for another dose. Close enough! I swallowed it down, rinsed my mouth assiduously with water, then started worrying that maybe cough syrups only come in syrup form because they have to adhere to your throat to work, and by rinsing it out with water, I was undoing its effects. So then I had to swallow the water and hope I wasn't just throwing my cough syrup down a figurative drain. [later I found out I wasn't, so all of that worrying was for no reason, and all of that vile medicine could be delivered much less disgustingly].

More time passed. I tossed, I turned, I had annoying half-dreams while still being conscious of being awake. I felt like the whole night was that—my mind just drifting from thought to thought and plot to plot until, finally, it was 8 am and I crawled out of bed with great relief, just happy to not have to try to sleep any more. I felt even more tired than I had been when I went to bed. My eyes wouldn't work properly, and I couldn't concentrate worth a hoot!

Normally when I get up after a night of inadequate sleep, I can work for a while, take a nap a few hours later, and then face the day feeling mostly all right. Today, however, I got in bed  around 11, set my alarm for 2 hours, and waited. I got the same old half-dreams I got before. It didn't help that it was right around the time I expected my boyfriend to come online halfway around the world. So I had to leave the computer on and facing my bed just in case. Of course, he didn't come online, but the computer did try to go to sleep, prompting me to get out of bed half an hour into my nap and change the power settings, and then it turned its screen off another 15 minutes later, prompting me to debate whether I should get up again, or just leave it off. I decided to just leave it off, but it was too late; the sleep was already lost. An hour and a half into my sleepless "nap," I decided it just wasn't happening, so I got back up to cook some food in what could now be called full-on zombie mode.

I hope I can sleep again soon, preferably tonight! The last thing I want to do is add insomnia to my list of chronic ailments.

WhyNot?

When you have worked the last six years in a beverage-focused field and also magically start receiving Shape magazine in the mail without ever subscribing, you end up reading a lot of things about the health benefits of various drinks. Things like:

• Mystery coffee ingredient boosts protection against Alzheimer’s 
• Coffee lowers depression risk in women up to 20%: 10-year study
• Coffee consumption may lower endometrial cancer risk, study
• Why Coffee May Lower Diabetes Risk 
• Study Shows That Alcohol Drinkers May Exercise Up to 10 Percent Longer Than Non-Drinkers
• Women who consume one alcoholic drink a day at mid-life may be healthier when older when compared to those who don’t drink at all.
• Why Nondrinkers May Be More Depressed

With all this compelling evidence, it's hard to justify my abstinence from these popular legal drugs.

I have tried them both, so I can't say I'm a "substance virgin," (and therefore don't have anything to protect) but I can say (with pride, I'll add), that I don't have to drink to have fun, and I can wake up in the morning without my cup of joe. But does personal pride outweigh the potential for a greater quality of life? Is it time to hop off the wagon?

Here is an in-depth analysis of the issue.

Coffee

...Is probably one of the most disgusting food-like substances that exists. It tastes ghastly, it stains your mouth, it aggravates stomach problems, and it turns otherwise sane people into savage beasts when it is not available.

I don't think there is any health benefit short of immediate prevention of acute death that could turn me into a coffee drinker. The only way to make coffee palatable is to heavily infuse it with sugar, which I daresay negates its positive effects.  Perhaps if I could take it as a supplement (say, in one massive dose that I could quickly down with a cup of good old water), then I'd be willing to give it a try, putting it on the same schedule as my almost-daily-except-when-I-forget-which-is-sometimes-days-in-a-row multivitamin and calcium tablet. But to actually drink it--especially the 4 cups a day required to prevent diabetes? No way!

Alcohol

I have avoided alcohol on principle since I was a proud underage goody-goody, and on basically the same principle after I crossed that magical 21-year mark. My ostensible reasons are:

• It tastes bad
• It's expensive
• I don't want to get addicted

But I think, deep down, my real reason is just vanity. I am so above all those corporeal pleasures. Look at me with my little halo. Tra la la la la.

Anyway, isn't the whole point of drinking to get drunk? If you have to stop at one glass, why bother in the first place? All one serving does for you is fill your mouth with a terrible taste, add a lot of calories to your diet, and subtract a lot of dollars from your wallet. Is a daily shot of fattening, expensive, unappetizing alcohol worth the reduced risk of depression? Gosh, just the thought depresses me.
Besides, the same article that says that alcohol drinkers seem healthier in their old age also says that alcohol drinkers have a 30 percent higher risk of dying of breast cancer. Case closed.

But what am I going to do with that bottle of wine I got as a Christmas present?

A Tale of Hypochondria

Early in October, I went on a much-needed vacation that got a passing mention in this blog. What I didn't mention was that while I was there, I started experiencing this incessant abdominal pain. Well, without going into too great a detail about my bathroom habits, I will say that I was diagnosed with IBS almost 10 years ago, and abdominal pain is nothing new to me. However, incessant abdominal pain is a horse of a different color!
Usually, when something goes wrong with my health, I assume the worst. Last spring, I started feeling a persistent tingling in my feet and was convinced that I had diabetes. I visited the doctor and requested a diabetes test, which came out negative. The doctor also tested me for vitamin B deficiencies (also negative) and concluded that my problem probably stemmed from standing in place too long at work. Once I had duly embarrassed myself with this false alarm, the tingling disappeared within a few days, mission accomplished.

When my tummy started hurting nonstop, I naturally self-diagnosed a bowel obstruction. However, as those bowel habits that I'm trying hard not to go into much detail about hadn't changed much, an obstruction seemed unlikely. As I researched the issue further, a few words kept popping out at me: celiac disease.

Celiac disease is a tricky little disorder; while many patients suffer bloating, diarrhea, constant pain, and all sorts of nutritional deficiencies (sometimes characterized by tingling in the feet!), others have no symptoms. If you have any one of the symptoms, you might have the disease. And I had TWO.

Well, I worked myself into another frenzy of anxiety. The thought of having to start a gluten free diet depressed the heck out of me. I visited celiac disease websites compulsively for a few days, and called the doctor for another appointment, which I could not get until the middle of the next week.

In the meantime, I started feeling these twinges that would appear and disappear spontaneously under my solar plexus and under the left and right sides of my ribs. As I noticed them and paid them more attention, they migrated up into my chest, and then up into my throat. It felt like the time I got a pill stuck in my esophagus. I worried a little half-heartedly about heart disease, but really it sounded suspiciously like acid reflux (except I thought heartburn was supposed to burn, not feel like a cramp!), Guess what! Tons of the people on the celiac disease forums also suffer from acid reflux! Coincidence? I thought not.

Well, my doctor (who persistently refuses to diagnose these dread diseases I keep coming down with) diagnosed acid reflux and prescribed me an antacid. However, at my request, she also ordered 3 celiac blood tests.

They came back negative. I started feeling better almost immediately.

And then, a few days ago, I remembered a certain party that I chickened out of attending this summer. I had driven myself almost all the way there, getting more and more nervous as I got closer. By the time I reached the street where the party was held, I had reached a pinnacle of anxiety. When I cruised past the door to the house where the party was held and didn't see any sign of a party, I knew I couldn't go through with it. So I kept on cruising back towards home, feeling that very same constricted feeling under my sternum. I remember explaining to my boyfriend later why I couldn't possibly attend: "I was so nervous, I got heartburn! And I never get heartburn!"

So now I see the reason for all this recent gastric upset. Stress! First I was all in a tizzy looking for jobs, and then that tizzy swung right around into full-blown bedbug paranoia, and then when I started feeling the physical symptoms, I made them even worse by worrying about them!

Unfortunately, the stress is not over. Today, while looking for a tank top in my bags of clothes in the basement, I saw a brown spot on one of the white bags. I looked closer. It was a bedbug! A deadbug bedbug, but how had it gotten there!? Best case, it blew out of the freezer when I was trying to retrieve it (I vaguely remember losing one of my specimens due to some injudicious breathing). Worst case, it had made its home in the basement, or in my bags of clean clothes!

Tomorrow we do our second treatment with the pesticides. I will remove the thick protective layer of diatomaceous earth around my bed and replace it with a thin, killing layer. I hate to do this, because I've been bite-free for almost two weeks and I want to stay that way, but if you want to lure bedbugs to their deaths, you have to use yourself as bait. I will wait two weeks, maybe three, and if we are still getting bitten, I will call in an exterminator. My worst fear is that even that last-ditch effort will not succeed.