Kimberly Jordan

5150

I knew I needed help, but I was NOT expecting this. Here I was, sitting in the Emergency Room waiting area of the hospital five minutes away from my house, waiting to be called back, my dad by my side. It was nearing midnight and I was wearing the same thing I had been wearing for several days in a row now, an oversized college t-shirt and black shorts, my usual pajamas. My mind was reeling with activity, I felt like I was literally going insane from the sleep debt I had accrued over the last five days. By this time, I had been battling with the depression part of my bipolar disorder for quite a while. I was diagnosed with the disorder at the usual time for a female: her early twenties, and now, I was several years into it at twenty-five years of age. I could usually manage the insomnia and get by with a few hours of sleep a night, but this time was different, it had gotten extraordinarily bad. I was running off of a total of twelve hours of sleep, spread out over five days. This didn’t mean that I slept for a few hours, lumped together, every day for five days. Oh no, that would have been blissful. No. This meant that I would sleep an hour here, be awake for six hours and sleep another hour there, and then be awake for another several hours, only to finally get to sleep, and sleep for barely thirty minutes. Days. It went on for days. My psychiatrist had given up on me at this point regarding the insomnia. We had tried everything: anxiety meds, sleep meds, muscle relaxers, tranquilizers, over-the-counter sleep meds, and even the more natural pathways like melatonin and meditation. Meditation never worked, my mind could never focus on my breathing long enough to settle down into a meditative state, so I considered that treatment crap-treatment. I even tried exhausting myself physically by exercising. Nothing worked. Nothing put me to sleep and kept me there long enough to get sufficient rest. My body would shut down, but not my mind, so after five days of suffering through hell, I went to the emergency room. I could not stop fidgeting and my knees just continued to bounce up and down, my feet tapping to music only I could hear. I had plenty of anxiety going on, though I didn’t know that is what it was. My thoughts were all over the place and finally, when the nurse called me in to be triaged, I said the stupidest thing I could have said in a hospital. I told her about my situation and that I was really desperate for sleep, so desperate that “I would take a whole bottle of sleeping pills to sleep if it would help, but it wouldn’t, so I wouldn’t take them.” BIG mistake.