The Feminist revolution: a nightmare?

JON: Everything seemed to be going in the right direction, I was beginning to see the first tender green shoots of several trite metaphors, etc. But then I had to go and do the obligatory sick man’s shuffle of one step forward and two steps back.

Marie and I were away from home for a few nights and were forced to share a bed – which is allowed, we’re married with bits of paper and joint bank accounts and everything. But to return to the point: as is my wont I went to bed early, about 9:30, took my pills and was asleep within minutes. Mare came later at a more grown-up time.

Some time later, in the small wee hours of the night, I woke Marie by shaking her vigorously and lecturing her loudly on how she should join the feminist revolution. Several well-placed kicks from Marie calmed me down – until I was at it again, this time demanding equal rights to education for women. This time, though, I woke myself up to and I can distinctly remember saying out loud: “OH SHIT, it’s just Discworld, isn’t it” (which, for the uneducated / un-medicated amongst you, means Terry Pratchett’s series of comic fantasy/SF, with 60 million books sold so far).

The rest of the night was blissfully un-eventful for Marie, although I was kept awake (I thought) by noises off. “So“, I hear you ask, “is that an auditory hallucination or are you just pleased to hear me?” Well, some of it just sounded like someone walking around upstairs – but I should point out that we were in a bungalow. Spooky.

The whole experience felt like a return to the bad old days of constant sleepwalking and scary night-time hallucinations which I thought I’d put behind me when I came off Sifrol over a year ago. So why did it happen again, and why now? It’s possible that I missed one of my nightly muscle relaxants, but when I have missed one before I have just stayed awake, not gone under and acted out my dreams. Or is it quite simply that we disturb eachother so much that it has become physically impossible for us to share a bed (for the purpose of sleep, at least)? The worst-possible-case scenario is that the Ritalin, which does me so much good during the day, is beginning to cause problems at night.

So the next night I experimented by not taking my muscle relaxant, which caused the usual insomniac misery (although much less shouting). So it wasn’t a missed pill. Nor has there been any recurrence (that we know of) since we came home to each our separate beds, which there should probably have been if it was the Ritalin playing up. So it was most likely just the situation that caused it. Not great, but that at least we can live with and work around.

And back in Flatland under the thumbs of my many and varied health professionals, my neurologist treated me to an interpretation of the results of my sleep clinic registration (see the post of 24 January 2010). The results, not very helpfully, were inconclusive: it might be REM sleep disorder, and then again it might not. What the tests did show was considerable activity in various muscle groups during sleep, particularly in my muscles of mastication. Better known as bruxing, this is so common it's almost normal.

In a nutshell: I have slightly disturbed sleep, REM sleep disorder in quite common in Parkinson’s, I have Parkinson’s, so my disturbed sleep is probably caused by REM sleep disorder. The most common treatment is more of the muscle relaxants I’m already taking, so we’ll go with that for now.

One good point is that the neurologist explained that although REM-SD and PD are related in occurrence, they are not necessarily related in severity. Which means that as the PD gets worse, the REM-SD may well stay exactly the same. I am also pleased that the sleep clinic didn’t diagnose some other, unrelated unpleasantness such as obstructive sleep apnoea which I was rather worried they might leap on. So I guess that although I am unfit for work, I am at least reasonably fit to go to sleep.