I believe that I have written before about having narcolepsy as well as schizophrenia, and while it is up for grabs whether or not this sleep disorder as well might be caused by Lyme Disease, at this point it seems moot in both cases. I still seem to need the psych meds as well as the narcolepsy meds, so what difference does it make if the Borrelia bacterium originally caused the disorders? It seems that I have them now, so I must go on from there…

 

Anyhow, ever since college, at about age 22, I have had a terrible time with daytime sleepiness, no matter how much sleep I got at night. I could never stay awake during the day unless I were walking or physically active. Once I stood still, and god forbid if I sat down, I was immediately subject to an overwhelming urge to sleep and it seems to dream, the latter not always coming after the first.

 

The dreaming before I feel asleep only grew worse as I aged, until in my late thirties and early forties I began to have to ask others whether I dreamed something or if it really happened, because I could not tell the difference. I did have a kind of a touchstone, the very fact that I had to ask the question, seemed to mean that it did not in fact happen, but I never quite trusted that understanding until after I’d gotten the denial. In my late forties, it was happening every day, and in addition I was hallucinating visually, not scary things, but hallucinations like stories that I could discuss with Dr O objectively, but bizarre enough that she was concerned. It wasn’t clear how much of this was REM-sleep intruding into the waking state, a phenomenon of narcolepsy and how much was schizophrenia, especially when the hallucinations spoke to me and told me to harm myself, and I obeyed them.

The reason I relate all the above is that we eventually solved the problem, at least this one, and while I told the tale on my other schizophrenia site I feel it is important to tell it here as well.

 I haven’t wanted to muddy the waters before now or get people’s hopes up for a drug that might help one person in a million. But who’s to say what might be helpful or not in other cases of schizophrenia. So here, forthwith, is a fuller story of how I recovered.

 

In 2004, I did something quite desperate. In response to voices telling me to immolate myself, and on an impulse to put an end to their tormenting me, I set fire to my left leg, with the result that I had third degree burns and skin grafting. I had burned most of my forearms before this, but incrementally, and had burned out cigarettes against my face too, but have never done anything quite so dangerous as this. I realized how close I had come, pouring lighter fluid over me, to setting myself on fire, not to mention the building itself. It could not happen again. So the first step, beyond choosing life over death, was vowing to take every medication I was prescribed as prescribed, without fail, until the doctor’s orders changed.

 

I made up a contract, after I got out of the hospital, and gave it to my visiting nurse, saying that I would not refuse a single dose of medication ever. And in fact, I did not. That certainly stabilized me to the point where I stayed out of the hospital, though I didn’t feel particularly well. Then, I finally agreed to try a drug Dr O had for a year been urging me to take. Xyrem, a night-time drug for narcolepsy, is meant to regulate sleep in narcolepsy, help the patient attain slow wave sleep, and thereby enable her to be more awake during the day. If I could be awake and alert during the day, the theory went, the spells of waking dreaming would  happen less often, I would need fewer stimulants, and the sleep attacks would cease…among other things. 

 

Xyrem is not a drug without a difficult past. Once known as the “date rape drug” it has faced bitter controversy. Hearing were held in congress over whether it had any therapeutic uses. Luckily, testimony by persons with narcolepsy convinced the powers that be not to ban the drug outright. Thanks to their efforts it is still available, under very special circumstances, and with careful supervision, from one central pharmacy in Michigan or Illinois, as an orphan drug, schedule III or IV.

 

It is however a difficult drug to take, and I admit that no matter how quickly I get it down, I dread it each time. A liquid, just a tiny amount, maybe 6ml, mixed with water or grape juice or non-acidic kool-ade and taken just before bed. It’s bad tasting — actually on the salty side — so you have to dilute it well, but not more than they say. Then, the worst part, you must pour a second dose, put it on your nightside table, set an alarm for 3-4 hours later, wake and take a second dose, no matter how deeply asleep you already were!

 

When I first started taking it, falling asleep terrified me, because I just tumbled into blackness after twenty minutes, and the plummeting off that cliff into unconsciousness was precisely what had always made me reluctant to sleep at night. I had a hard time falling asleep for weeks, feeling the bed rock beneath me, my body trembling and my ears roar, and all sorts of unnerving bodily sensations that turned out to be more fear than anything else. After about a month, though, I was able to take the drug without trouble, except for the middle of the night awakening, which bedevils me to this day…

 

I found a website, MyCalls.com where you can set up a schedule of recorded messages that they will play at a certain time at night when they automatically call you to wake you, but I find that I barely hear the phone after a certain number of calls, and when I do, I simply pick it up, press one, to cancel the call, and hang up, then fall asleep again. Even if I don’t manage to do that much, I know the phone will quit ringing eventually, and that the calls will cease after three repeats. I’m lucky if I manage even to hear them at all; if I’m in a really deep Xyrem-doze at the time I’ll simply sleep right through.

 

The effects of taking Xyrem can be felt within two weeks if you’re lucky, though it takes months for some, and for me it was a miraclous 12 days. My improvements however, had nothing whatsoever to do with narcolepsy, which was the strangest thing. Improvement in that sphere did take months to appear. What improved were the last symptoms of schizophrenia.

 

The last little but still important symptoms just fell away: I began to look at Dr O and finally knew what she, and certain other people, looked like; I began to gradually, shade by shade beome desensitized to the color red, which had terrorized me for decades; when the evening visiting nurse asked me if had been hearing any voices that day, I could honestly answer, No. I felt little paranoia, had no trouble distinguishing reality from non-reality, and for the first time began to understand why my delusions were delusions and that  the voices were only false perceptions inside my head.

 

Since we hadn’t started or stopped or changed any other drug in a long time, it seemed clear that Xyrem was responsible for this miracle. I really don’t have any idea if it would work for anyone else. Dialysis worked for Carol North, a former schizophrenic turned psychiatrist, who wrote WELCOME SILENCE. Since then, according to her,  it has worked for no one else and she does not recommend it. So I might be the ONLY one that Xyrem could help. Nevertheless, a nagging part of me reminds me that psychosis is often described as a waking nightmare, and perhaps this is for a reason. If Xyrem helped this go away, literally, for me, (it is part of narcolepsy), who’s to say what it would do in others with schizophrenia…

 

Now it is 2009, a couple of years after I wrote most of the above. I would like to add  the following: when I get my 8 hours of good Xyrem-mediated rest at night, with the proper proportion of slow wave delta sleep, I feel like a million dollars the following day.  That does not, however, keep all my symptoms at bay, nor does it enable me to cope with everything as well as I wish I could…My apartment seems to “fall apart” and it is hard to get it together by myself, so Lynnie pays my friend Jo to help me every two weeks (she is also a professional housekeeper) lest it get completely out of hand. My stamina is still limited, so I have to keep a careful watch on how much I commit myself to each day, and in a sense how far from home I go (lest I can’t get back before I get exhausted).

 

 

Exhaustion is my biggest fear…that and sleepiness. I am so afraid that I will end up somewhere, as I have, and suddenly find myself overcome with sleepiness, and have nowhere to fall asleep for a half hour. That feeling is such agony, and indeed can be overpowering. What then? is my worst nightmare…And the outcome has sometimes been negative to the max.  I do my best to take my medication both at night and on time during the day to avoid getting sleepy when I can least afford it. ( I’m always sleepy at 11am, and usually sometime between 3-6pm) I have my cell phone set every day at 11am, but too often I ignore it or find myself somewhere too incovenient to stop and take a pill, to my great detriment later when I find myself suddenly drowsy while driving, or feeling a sleep attack coming on while visiting Joe in the hospital…

 

Nevertheless, Xyrem has been a miracle drug for my schizophrenia (Lyme-induced or not). First of all, the other drug cocktail apparently treated my more florid positive symptoms, but according to my twin, a psychiatrist, the Xyrem treated the negative ones, made me seem normal: all the things I could do truly did knit together. She didn’t know I was on it, but when I appeared at her door after taking it for about a month, she opened the door, took one look at me, stepped back, and said, “Oh. My. God.” Then she rcovered a bit, “You look wonderful, Pammy, normal.” She says I looked her square in the eye, was wearing something colorful for the first time in decades, had curled my hair and was even wearing make-up, (never again!) as if I actually cared how I looked. She couldn’t believe it. She said my walk was almost normal, that I was less awkward in my body. She felt like she had her twin back.