FMS Issues and Babies

I’m get­ting awful­ly girly late­ly. Must be all that in-love stuff. I paint­ed my nails before hav­ing cof­fee this morn­ing. I’m still not good at it, but I’ve been practicing.

Since we have talked a bit about hav­ing a baby, I checked on the three pre­scrip­tion med­ica­tions I take. Effex­or is safe, so no wor­ries there. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the oth­er two meds I take are list­ed as “class C.” That means their sta­tus is real­ly pret­ty much unknown because they’re too new for there to be much data. There’s no evi­dence that they WILL cause prob­lems, but there’s no assur­ance that they won’t.

I already cut down from tak­ing one of those meds, Provig­il, twice a day and just take it in the morn­ing. Since I don’t take pain med­ica­tions for fibromyal­gia, the fatigue from the chron­ic pain can be pret­ty dif­fi­cult. Provig­il is an atyp­i­cal stim­u­lant that helps com­bat fatigue. I can han­dle just tak­ing it once a day, and I fig­ure I’ll try not tak­ing it at all.

The oth­er med­ica­tion is Sero­quel, which is in a new class of antipsychotics—no, I’m not psy­chot­ic. But in a real­ly low dose (like 1/8 of the nor­mal min­i­mum effec­tive dose for treat­ing some­one with schiz­o­phre­nia), it also helps peo­ple with FM and some oth­er con­di­tions sleep more nor­mal­ly. I have trou­ble get­ting to sleep and stay­ing asleep, and when I do sleep it isn’t rest­ful. When I can’t rest, the FM pain gets much, much worse. 

Stan­dard sleep­ing pills don’t help—sure, I’ll go to sleep, but I still don’t real­ly rest. It has some­thing to do with not get­ting some impor­tant sleep stage—I nev­er can remem­ber which one it is. Tak­ing enough pain meds would also put me out—but I still would­n’t get rest. And because there’s way too much his­to­ry of sub­stance abuse on both sides of my fam­i­ly, I’m afraid to take either pain meds or sleep­ing pills on a reg­u­lar basis.

I tried not tak­ing the Sero­quel last night. That did­n’t work well. I did­n’t get more than a cat­nap all night, so Sam end­ed up not get­ting much rest, either. And now I’m hav­ing trou­ble mov­ing around, and we have an extreme­ly busy day ahead of us. And a very busy week­end. Yes, it was a stu­pid time to try not tak­ing the Sero­quel. And I def­i­nite­ly had to take the Provig­il this morn­ing, and will prob­a­bly have to take the sec­ond dose today, too. Grrrr.

So I guess I have to talk to the doc­tor about safer alter­na­tives (and there isn’t one for Provig­il, hon­est­ly) or give up on the idea of hav­ing anoth­er baby because I don’t want to gam­ble with a child’s health. Actu­al­ly, I fig­ure if we could find some­thing that lets me sleep well, I could do with­out the Provigil.