Hi Kate

I've been trying Trazodone for sleep, and was on ambien before that. What used to work best for me was L-tryptophan, but they took it off the market many years ago. Now, it's back, combined with Melatonin and a bunch of natural herbal things. Couldn't find it in the stores so I ordered it online.

Some nights the trazodone sort of works, but other nights it's as if I took nothing. Night before last I was up until 6am. Of course part of this is that my wife also has insomnia. Used to think it was Caregiver's Insomnia, from caregiving and standing watch in the middle of the night. Now, I'm really frightened that her night restlessness is part of Something Else, which I'll talk about in the Caregiver's forum.

I remember when I was with my late wife on a cruise, the one we wanted to do for our 25th but which the doctor said we better do a year early (she died the following March). We were at dinner at a table of 8. You sit with the same people every night. Anyway, I was sitting next to a doctor and talking to him. Suddenly, nothing at all happened, but he was looking at me strangely, and said that he was positive that I had just had a petit mal seizure.

Never got a chance to follow that up because my late wife started acting really strangely, starting right at the end of the cruise. Turns out her cancer had gone to her brain, and she got more and more odd and sometimes violent, and we had to have her committed for a month at one point, right after they FINALLY did an MRI and found a tumor the size of a baseball inside her temporal lobe. Got the real Marian back at the end, though, for three weeks.

Where am I in my MD visits? Right now we're chasing down my pituitary malfunction and I find out about the MRI results tomorrow. Believe it or not, it wasn't until I had gone to see an acupuncturist that I experienced someone asking questions about my history in a non-fragmented way. He gave me a blank piece of paper and said: write down everything that happened to you, including illnesses and injuries. He read about the concussions and other traumas I haven't mentioned, and said to go see an endocrinologist immediately.

Contrast that with the "histories" that MDs have you fill out. You check a list of boxes that indicate what they are interested in looking for. They give you a tiny line to list your operations. Most never have a line for injuries or concussions. Most people can fill these out in about three minutes.

I have not had anyone address the multiple concussions directly except for a sleep doctor who prescribed provigil for daytime sleepiness. I had been having over 300 periods of central apnea per night, and was so sleep deprived I would be with people and suddenly be in a dream, talking to dream people. The "real" people were often not amused. You have to be pretty sleep-deprived to have daytime REM episodes.

So I haven't had time, in all this other caregiving and surviving, to really address being bonked on the head so many times.

Nice to meet you, concussionkate

gershonb