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I used to joke about the fact that the last good night’s sleep I got was in 1984, but really it was closer to the truth. I have Fibromyalgia, which causes sleep disturbance (or the chicken/egg theory is that sleep disturbance causes it) and also severe arthritis which causes pain especially at night. I’ve had the FM for over 25 years, and sleep problems even before that. I think I’ve had them since I was a young child.
I’d have both trouble falling asleep (because of pain) and problems sleeping deeply. I also had problems of waking up after a few hours and not being able to go back to sleep. I think I averaged maybe 5 hours a night for the last 25 years, and during menopause 4 hours if I was lucky.
About a year ago I decided to try an OTC sleep aid(Unisom). I just took one tab a night and like magic I started sleeping like a baby. With the FM I’m very sensitive to medication of any type, and can often take less. I tried half a tab, worked just as well.
Shortly after I started sleeping well (8-9 hours) I noticed that my FBS was lower than it had ever been. I finally (before the sleep tab) had gotten it down to 100-120 most of the time, with a great deal of effort, but couldn’t budge it from there. Now I was averaging 69 -89 on a regular basis. I even tried not eating right away and it still stayed about the same. All of my other numbers decreased as well, but since they were already good I wasn’t concerned with them.
Being a scientific type, I tried not taking the aid for a week. Not only did my fasting numbers increase, I had the worst FM flare-up that I’d had for years!!!! That was it for me, I’m taking the aid. It’s not supposed to be habit forming, and it works so well I’m not going to worry about it.
Here’s some links I searched on sleep and diabetes. There are a lot out there, this is just a select few, click on the titles:
Lizzy © EMO 3/12
Knowledge is Power
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