Ok one Sunday night in mid Aug 2010, looking fwd to a busy Monday morning, I was sleeping sound, when the buzzer on my drying machine woke me up. It was approx 12 am!! As I sat on my bed, found my heart racing out of control. So jumped off bed and out the house…”God is this is a heartache”, I thought. That was a loooooooong night…Couldn’t get back to sleep. I had to wake up a doc friend at 5 am and chat with him about my symptoms and he used this tachycardia term and asked me to see an internist the next day. After 6 am, my heart beat came back to normal.
I did not have a family doc till then. Ok now was the time to get one, I thought. Anyhow scrapped work the next day and went to see a doc at the mini-ER here. They ran a battery of tests and declared me a-ok! As I was walking out of the mini-ER I noticed a family practice opposite the road. So I walk in there and decide to give this doc named Joe Gallagher a chance to be my family doc. His credentials were excellent – viz., 30 years of experience! What could go wrong.
Had to wait some time to see doc Gallagher. I told him about my symptoms and mentioned that I had a sleep issue when this panic attack like thing came on. Doc finished his test and handed me over a prescription and said…”Have this for a month and come and see me”. It was for a drug called Zolipedum Tartarate(generic name for “Ambien”; with strength=10mg). CVS filled the prescription and that day had one. Wow! the sleep was extremely good and I felt so relaxed the first day.
To make a long story short, every day from then I took the pill as ordered by the doc. Slowly I changed..I was getting depressed. Also one fine day as I walked into the long corridor at my office, everything looked blurred. I panicked..is this a stroke?? I ran to the eye doctor and he prescribed me glasses for distance vision. I had double-vision from then on thanks to this drug. I started seeing halos around everything. So I checked-out this drug on wiki…and was alarmed…It said to not have this drug for more than 2 weeks…and I was on it for close to a month.
So I rush to the doc again..My wife and I beg him to take steps to get me off this awful drug-in effect reduce the dependency slowly. To which, our doc Gallagher said “I don’t think you can get off that drug now. It could be a lifelong thing. You could try and eat half of it” ..the rest I didn’t hear. Here I was..a person who strived to keep away from docs all his life (because of the suspicion that most docs were sophisticated drug dealers) at the mercy of a doc!!
I had planned in the beginning of Aug to go to NY and then onwards to India at the end of November. And the plan was to spent 4 days in NY. Our plan was to reach NY on the 26th of Nov right after T’giving 2010. Two days before T’giving day the Zolipedum drug stopped working on me…So I increased it from 10 to 15 mg and that worked for a night…Now I had a few days to spend in NY and was worried. We landed in NY…I did not sleep for the next few days at NY…and my flight out to India was a nightmare. I landed in Dubai and thought I was going to die there…but luckily with a massage from my wife I had an hour’s worth of sleep and hence was able to spent some quality time with some family in Dubai.
I land in India…and since I come from a family of docs and nutritionists, I was kind of lucky. The day I landed, my mom made me some idlis. I had 10 of those with something called “dosha podi” ( made from powdered grams and spices”) and a glass of sweetened milk. Within an hour I fell asleep and slept for like 7 hrs!!!! The first non-drug sleep in ~ 4 months. The next week was full of tests(blood, brain-scan etc). My brother(a fine doc) looked at my results and found it perfect….Only one thing…my HB was low..So he prescribed me ferrous sulphate tabs. From then on my sleep became natural. Also massages from wife before sleep seemed to work well. Also there was this ayurvedic oil called NeeliBringadi- which you apply on your head and later wash off- which helped with my sleep. On top of all that I went and joined a yoga class which made me tired enough and taught me mental relaxation techiniques to fall asleep. Anyhow…I was cured…not by some Godforsaken drug, but due to natural remedies!
So in short, if faced with insomnia, never treat the symptoms…get to the problem. In my case, I needed some time off, perhaps. If you can’t sleep for a few days, that is ok. Don’t follow some stupid doc’s advice of getting yourself dependent on some weird drug – all these drugs have side effects and once you are on, you are on for good – unless you run away from it like I did.
