While I Was Sleeping

In just three short weeks it will have been seven years since my dad died.  Seven years!  Many things have changed since November 26 of 2007, but I am experiencing it anew, because I recently woke up from a seven year sleep.  Shortly after my father’s death, I stopped sleeping at all.  My life at the time was a rat’s nest of stress—even before Dad’s sudden and brutal death at the hands of two hit-and-run drivers.  Dad and I had talked on the phone the day before his death, and he had promised to come stay with me for an extended time to ease my burden.  He knew I was struggling with legal issues surrounding our business and with raising four children, including twin year-old babies.  I was in tears on the phone, and Dad told me that we would come soon to Texas so that he could cook and chase toddlers while I tried to manage our company.  It was a great relief to me, and I hung up the phone with a sense of optimism that help would arrive soon.

Two days later I was in my husband’s office when I learned that Dad had been killed in Gaithersburg, MD, while crossing a street at dusk.  My trusted friend—and father—was gone from this life for good.  I wept like a wounded animal, wailing behind that closed door with a grief I had never felt before.  It was an unspeakable wound.  My children refer to that time as “the Christmas where you sat on the couch and cried every day.”  I left the Christmas tree up well into January and I spent hours sitting on that couch or lying in my bed just staring at the walls.  My doctor prescribed Ambien, and I started to sleep again, which was good.  My life was still a rat’s nest of stress, and I still had four children to raise.  I needed sleep.

Ambien is a beautiful thing when you can’t sleep.  You take it right before bed and then wait for the sleep to come.  It was a wonderful gift to me at the time, because I was also regularly talking with the assistant district attorney who was prosecuting one of the hit-and-run drivers in the Montgomery County, MD, courts.  I needed to have a clear mind to hear evidence and help the ADA make decisions about the case.  I also needed to raise babies.  And try to do my job at work.  And try to help my husband who was battling with lawyers and the Texas EPA and trying to fix the steaming crap pile the previous owner had left for us at our industrial site.  They were difficult days, and sleep was a welcome escape.

At the time, the medical opinion was that you could take Ambien for a really long time.  My sleep doctor even said I could take it every day until the day I died.  Ambien was part of the Ambien-Lunesta marketing juggernaut that promised weary Americans the chance to sleep peacefully every night for 8 hours.  Works for me.  Sign me up!

You sleep through the worst of your trials.  Life moves on and you think that maybe you don’t need Ambien to sleep any longer.  The problem is that Ambien has a really short half-life.  As it rapidly courses through your veins, telling your neurotransmitters to slow down and hold that message until tomorrow, your body is ready for another dose at bedtime.  It really REALLY wants some more Ambien to go to sleep.  Medical literature said that it was not addictive and not habit forming, but for many people, once you stop taking this blissful little happy pill, you get rebound insomnia and start staring at the walls again.  Every. Single. Night.  You grit your teeth and try to make it through the Ambien rebound insomnia, but after about 72 hours of being awake, you think, “Screw this!  Pass the Ambien!”

I was shocked to find that there are now Ambien withdrawal programs at most major rehab centers, because Ambien not only works for sleep, but in high doses, it makes you feel really calm and totally able to manage your life.  It’s a happy pill for people who grow immune to the sleep effects.  And then there are the long-term effects on your short-term memory.  Ambien should hold neurological messages until the next morning, when your neurotransmitters slide the memos across the desk, and your neurons quickly respond to what happened the day before.  The problem is, for some people (including me), your neurons start dropping messages on the floor.  Or they wad up the messages and throw them in the trash.

You go to the doctor.  He tests your thyroid.  He checks your liver.  He gives you the Alzheimer’s test, which, amazingly, you pass.  He tells you to exercise more and lower your stress.  Then he looks at the chart you filled out where you listed all your meds.  He rattles them off again, and you say, “Oh, and there’s Ambien.  I forgot to put that on the form.”  He gives you the are-you-an-idiot look, because you’ve now had several tests and he’s told you to take steps to improve your brain function.  You’ve seen him twice and complained about your deteriorating brain.  “Stephanie!  It’s the Ambien!!  Why didn’t you tell me?”  Well, duh!  I was taking Ambien!  I forgot!  Besides, he wasn’t the doctor who prescribed the Ambien, and that doctor wasn’t worried about your little baby dose.  There are people taking 100 times the dose I was on.  Big deal, right?

So there it is.  I can get my mind back if I stop the Ambien.  This has been a three-week process, and after the second week, I started having what I call a “flooding” of memories.  They’re all from the time when I started Ambien seven years ago.  My Christmas tree is up in January of 2008, and I’m staring at the wall while blaring my dad’s favorite Christmas album.  The world is going on around me, and I’m crying while my children walk around me and the world goes on without my dad.  Only the memories are filtered through seven years of life passing by, so the pain is much less intense, and I can actually smile about my dad instead of just crying.  It’s as if my neurotransmitters stuffed an entire filing cabinet with memos from that time, and with the Ambien gone, they’re dumping memos off the second story balcony in our old Texas house.  The memos are raining down on me in a steady fluttering cloud.  I pick them up to read them, and it’s as if I’m getting the messages for the first time.

I have all the lovely, beautiful memories of Dad’s memorial service, and of our last conversation, and all the sweet concern he showed for my troubled heart.  I think of the stories his friends told at his service.  They’ve all been stuck in an endless no-man’s land in my brain, stuck in that filing cabinet of neurotransmissions that never reached their target.  I’ve been doing a lot of crying the past week, but it’s not really sad tears as much as gratitude for the sweet remembrances of friends and families, and of the tender spot my dad still holds in my heart.

It’s as if the universe put me to sleep so that I could tolerate the overwhelming magnitude of my situation.  Ambien was the vehicle that drove me to a secluded spot, the one my dad had promised to offer with his cooking and his childcare.  It put me to sleep just enough to numb the pain.  This feels like new grief, but it is blissfully faded by seven years of time passing.  Time does heal some wounds.  It makes them smaller and less painful, and I am so grateful for that, because the tears had been stored in my data bank, just waiting for the messages to finally get through.  I break into crying jags without warning, but it’s not the pitiful hopeless crying of seven years ago.  It’s just a flood of feelings that have mellowed with time.

I just looked over and saw the poster from my dad’s first memorial racquetball tournament.  It’s signed by his many friends who played that weekend.  It’s like my dad is saying, “Where’ve you been, Steph?”  I’ve been sleeping, Dad.  I don’t remember all my words yet, and I still stumble over names, but I feel more like me.  I’m waking up.  I can hear my dad say, “It’s almost time to put on that Percy Faith Christmas album.  When do you want to go cut the Christmas tree?  I’ll be there in a few weeks to help you make Thanksgiving dinner.”   Ambien probably saved my sanity.  That period of babies and lawsuits, a funeral and a screwed up trial for one of Dad’s killers is perhaps the absolute darkest phase of my life.  I thank God that I was able to sleep through it, and I’m thankful that I finally have the strength to wake up.  The babies are growing up, and we no longer own a business.  My husband still snores, but our stress level is a lot lower.  Thank God for Ambien.  And thank God for life without it.  I still miss my dad, but now I’m able to face it.  Awake.