About Me

A better night's sleep. It's an elusive creature that turns even the happiest person into something they barely recognize after a few exhausting days and sleepless nights. I've seen it first-hand with my mom, who was being kept up in the hospital by the constant noises and nurses coming in every half hour. Once there was even construction going on at all hours on the floor above. At the same time, she was also abruptly taken off a medicine that has terrible withdrawal symptoms, including hallucinations. For days, she didn't sleep for more than a few minutes every hour. The results were scary for the whole family. I've also experienced sleep problems, whether getting to sleep or staying asleep or being uncomfortable during sleep. I'd not been getting enough sleep most nights since I was in high school, all the way back in the 90's, and a sick parent makes it worse.

But it was more than that. It was also about an vitamin deficiency (undiagnosed, but very likely) that I unwittingly made nearly catastrophically worse while dieting. Never thought it would be dangerous for me to merely skip breakfast every day. I know breakfast is always called the most important meal, but it was the easiest way for me to lose the weight I've struggled with my whole life. Skipping meals never hurt me before, at least not in any noticeable, immediate way. I've never been hungry in the morning. Some mornings I'm even nauseous. I've been that way since childhood and never thought much of it. I used to assume it was because school made me nervous, so I often didn't eat or had something small, and that continued into adulthood. I didn't always shun the morning meal, but I would eat it late, hours after I got up. Speaking of, I just realized I completely forgot about breakfast while writing this. It's lunchtime now.

My New Year's Resolution, as it's been most of my life, was to finally lose weight and keep it off. I decided to do what I've done sporadically for 30 years and push breakfast to much later in the day to around 12 or 1 PM, sometimes later. I'd read that this intermittent fasting worked for some and I'd been doing a form of that for most of my life, yet not consistently. It wasn't difficult at all for me to go 16 hours or more without eating if I started a few hours before bedtime. I also wanted to try to drastically cut carbs, because that's the only way I was ever able to shed pounds before. I would only have to not make up for the calories I didn't eat later in the day by bingeing on every snack in and out of sight. Easy peasy and it was working. I was getting less and less hungry the further I pushed myself. That should have been a red flag, but it was so normal by then that I thought it was progress. The scale budged nicely, but a nutritional deficiency with sudden and terrifying consequences was lurking in the shadows, growing stronger, waiting to take hold.

Fast forward 7 months and suddenly I hurt myself, getting an infection and an abscess and horrible swelling out of nowhere that caused me to be confined to bed for months. Walking was a struggle, no exercise even possible. I missed the 4th of July, family parties, get-togethers, and the Big E in September. When I felt better, I immediately overdid things and things got worse again. When my monthly Aunt Flo came, it got even worse, and suddenly I was getting folliculitis all over my thighs! It became this cycle of getting almost back to normal and then spinning out of control. I finally know now that it had to be from pad chafing suddenly making skin raw enough to let in MRSA, which I may have picked up during the latest of my Mom's six hospital visits over the past three years. I needed four antibiotics to defeat the MRSA. It didn't matter that I showered every day, used wet wipes all the time, and washed my hands near neurotically before all this happened. I now have to disinfect everything all the time, and I have to be very careful of chafing. I never had problems with chafing before; it was never a scary word, but now I'm terrified of it and won't allow it to happen again. Even if you don't have MRSA concerns, you will get better sleep if your skin is soothed after a rough day. That's why Vaseline, Monistat Anit-Chafing Gel, and Body Glide are available in a Soothing Your Skin category.

Fast forward another month and a half, in the middle of all this, and suddenly I got this horrifying image in my head from a show I had stopped watching after this exact moment they had shown. It had gotten too horrifying and gross. No, it's not The Walking Dead, which I still, and always will, adore for the passion and dedication of its actors, its incredible dialogue and writing, and how it's given us this amazing, heartbreaking story of hope and survival against all odds. It's not any of the CSIs or Bones or any crime show that should have left more to the imagination at times. What I'm talking about is a show I thought I'd love because I was into the story it was based on, both books and movies. I liked it at first. It was intriguing, the game of cat and mouse, but it became so gratuitiously gruesome on a regular basis that it made me nauseous on a day I was already not feeling well. It did this without making up for it with soul-baring performances and realistically drawn characters to root for. I stopped watching and then not long after deleted all the episodes I'd recorded. It's since beeen cancelled, so there was no promise of story resolution anyway.

Then well over a year later, out of nowhere, the scene I mentioned, and will never describe here, popped into my head while I was doing nothing more than watching a random pleasant Hallmark movie while working. This image wouldn't go away and I dwelled on it for days. I would wake up to it every day. Nothing like this has ever happened before. It was like a nightmare that refused to be relegated to the nighttime. Suddenly nothing was bringing me joy, nothing close to that. I started putting on a fake smile, I laughed where I knew I should while watching comedies, I pretended that puppy and kitty videos were cute. I was suddenly not feeling any of that anymore. It was like a switch had flipped and I didn't care about anything.

Something was terribly wrong and I was screaming inside, not knowing what to do, too scared to tell anyone. I was terrified of myself. So I researched. I thought about going to a psychiatrist, but I found one thing that I wanted to try first: magnesium.* It's a mineral that's responsible for so many bodily processes and, seemingly, not accurately tested. One of those things magnesium is partially responsible for is blood pressure, and I've had untreated high blood pressure at least since I was in junior high. No idea why my pediatrician never prescribed anything to help, but after I aged out of my parents' insurance, I never had insurance again until the Affordable Care Act made it actually affordable. Don't worry, I recently finally got on Amlodipine.

I was terrified and started Googling everything I could find. My research led to magnesium deficiency being the most likely culprit. I had come across that as a possibility when I self diagnosed iron deficiency a few years before that. I was right about the iron deficiency, because all my very worrying symptoms—shortness of breath, constant eyelid twitching, exhaustion, among other things—started abating less than a week after I started taking iron. I've been fine since then, but I still haven't been eating the most nutritious foods half the time. I'll generally err on the side of lazy/tired/busy and have whatever leftovers are in the fridge. That combined with not eating in the morning, for many years, and I'm not surprised that my magnesium plummeted, if that's what happened. I can't get it confirmed, because my doctor wasn't concerned with the symptoms I mentioned to her and won't order a serum magnesium test or anything else other than the CBC I had when I became her patient back in July. The urgent care doesn't are either, so I'm left to fend for myself on this issue as I am used to.

In a few weeks of taking regular doses of magnesium, the horrible image became less and less frequent, and every time it happens, I now brush it off, remind myself that it was only a TV show, and sometimes supplement with a magnesium powder. I also suspect that I've always had some mild form of anxiety, which low magnesium can also affect. I've been stressed my whole life, but I thought I was dealing with it well until everything went kablooey. My racing mind is usually kept busy with things like this blog and all the things I love that keep me occupied. My main blog I've kept since 2010, but I haven't been able to do much with it this year as I was trying to start a business. The anxiety about getting back to that blog or finally moving ahead with my business increased the longer I was stuck in my bed or recliner just waiting for things to get better. I thought I'd be able to still get things done during all that downtime, maybe even more things, but my mind was preoccupied with the pain and worry. That anxiety made the situation worse, but the magnesium has steadily started getting me back to a pre-illness mindset. It seems it will be a slow road back to hopefully better than normal, but I'm starting to get excited about things, my favorite comedies are genuinely making me laugh again, and animal videos are once again making me squeak with joy or getting me choked up, like they always did.

During this time and for most of my life, I also had awful sleep, a contributor to increased anxiety and generally feeling blah. I have taken many steps to get a handle on this over the years and was successful, until my latest problem started unraveling me. Low magnesium can contribute to low serotonin, which affects mood and can lead to increased anxiety and trouble falling asleep/staying asleep, both problems I was having. This likely led to lower melatonin levels, which further contributes to disturbed sleep and even lower melatonin levels in a vicious cycle. So, I had to catch up on all the sleep I'd missed over the years. Apparently, sleep debt is a thing. I'm still tired, but trying to get a couple more hours every day and it's certainly helping. It helps to have a telecommuting job that doesn't care when I start work as long as I finish it. ;)

I'm doing well enough again and now I have even more experience with ways to get better sleep, and I wanted to share with you. Hence, the birth of Doze Zone. I now have many resources to give me the best sleep possible most of the time and I wanted to share them with you. If we all get a good night's sleep we'll all feel good and treat each other better.

* I am not a doctor and I am not endorsing any specific approach. I am only telling you what happened to me and how I handled it. I was always afraid of doctors. Up until the ACA, I had no insurance and treated any illnesses or injuries I had on my own. I fell down the stairs once, badly bruised my shin (and everything else). Wouldn't be surprised if I had fractured the bone. I limed everywhere for a while. I still have the lump. I most certainly fractured my pinky finger a few years ago and, while I had insurance by then, still I bought myself a boxer's fracture brace and waited two excruciating months for it to heal. I have a brace for nearly every part of my body by now. I even once caught bronchitis from my mom and brother and powered through, while they went to get diagnosed and treated. I'm kind of over all that now. I've been to the doctors a dozen times in the past few months. That's how scary this MRSA problem was for me. I'm sure the fear will crop up now and then when I'm concerned about something, but the desire to know what's wrong and get help will override my fear of a caring person trying to help me and the fear of the unknown. Please always talk to your doctor first if there's anything really bothering you.