Insomnia

[GregD]

Hi,
I had a small bowel resection almost 3 months ago. Since then I have developed some really severe insomnia. In the few weeks following my surgery I couldn't sleep, mainly because of the pain. Although, now that my pain has subsided, I'm still having problems. I usually get in bed between 11-12, and am almost always up until past 3am. Also, I wake up pretty much every hour and rarely feel like I get into deep REM sleep. Sometimes, when I lie in bed, I constantly feel the need to shift positions. This is starting to really affect my life, as I have a pretty demanding job that is tough to do on 4 hours of sleep, I am also tired all the time.
I have considered the mental contributors to this problem, however my levels of stress/anxiety/depression were much worse before my surgery than they are now, and I never had problems sleeping back then.
Does anybody else have this problem? Any good advice? I'd like to avoid taking sleeping pills if possible. Thanks.

-Greg

 

[Wiles]

Do you have a sense of what keeps waking you up?

I know after my surgery, even after the pain subsided I felt uncomfortable laying down. My insides felt like they weren't sitting right. I had a hard time getting sleep for quite a while. I don't feel like that anymore and I can sleep through the night again. I still have a hard time falling a sleep, but I think that has more to do with stress than anything else for me.

 

[Kev]

I didn't experience any deterioration or improvement with my sleep post surgery. I did notice that, no matter how much sleep I managed, I never woke up refreshed or rested. In fact, the longer I stayed in bed, the worse I felt getting up in the AM. I blamed this on my age, on the quality of my bed (altho it was very high quality). I held onto this 'belief' until I started on LDN therapy. One of the benefits of LDN for me was a complete turn around in my quality of sleep (tho sleep disruption is a reported side effect of LDN). Based on that experience alone, I 'believe' that our disease has an adverse affect on our sleep cycle. I've no definitive proof, and have not seen any studies to back up this belief. I feel that it is so subtle a change, so gradual, that it mostly goes un-reported, or is generally attributed to side effects from our various meds, or stress related due to illness. I think anyone who experienced first hand what I did on LDN would tend to accept or agree with my personal take on the situation.