Shelly,

I suggest to ask for help understanding your sleep behaviors. I know that mine are related to occasional sleep apnea of the3 central type. That means my brain forgets to tell my diaphragm to take a breath. My wife has witnessed this happening. Sometimes, i will stop breathing as many as 12 to 16 times per hour. Other times, she says I am breathing in a puffing movement. She can predict my mud headache from observing my breathing.

Since the brain stem controls breathing, any inflammation to it or near it can cause disruptions. When we were first discovering these signs, I spent almost a week with very low pulse and blood pressure. My pulse was in the 50's and BP was 80-90/40-50. I could barely get out of a chair. In hindsight, we remembered that I had fallen asleep in a car and sleep for a few hours with my head hanging forward and to the left.

We now know that I have a problem with neck position when I sleep. The head forward and to the left is usually associated with my sleep apnea. I spent a lot of money with an Upper Cervical Chiropractor trying to get improvements in this area. So far, no improvement. He did observe that I have a serious imbalance/tilt of C-1/atlas where it meets the skull.

This has been tough because I spent 20 years sleeping on my left side cuddled up to my wife. Now, if I do it, my breathing gets irregular and my body starts jerking. But, she says she will keep me anyway. She just pushes me over to my back so I stop jerking and breathing weird and waking her up.

The mud brain sounds so much like the symptoms the Tom Hanks character had in Joe Versus the Volcano. At least for us, it is real. We don't need to give doctors any more reason to think we are nuts.

Oops, time to go take my gabapentin before I forget and am up until 3 or 4:00 AM.

Now, go try to get a good night's sleep.