The Ambien Log
A couple of months into the new year, I had the option of changing my health insurance plan. Concerned that my health issues were going to become very costly, I upgraded my plan to the “Choice Plus”$ plan. Now all I had to do was hold on to my job long enough to see the benefits of this new insurance.
They have this policy at work. Something about coming in on time and showing up. I don’t’ know. My supervisor and manager called me into the office and sat me down to have a talk with me. The insomnia had made me appear aloof. This is frustrating to your boss when he’s trying to reprimand you for attendance. My performance in school was slipping. My performance in work had dropped off the charts. So, after some “subtle” nudging, I decided to make use of my new insurance and head to the doctor$.
I realize that doctors are busy folks, but there’s something about two minutes of diagnosis that seems lazy. Before I could even crinkle the butcher paper on the cold exam table, I had a prescription for Ambien in my hot little hand$.
If doctors are supposed to consider the healthiest options for their patients, then does it seem strange that 16 million prescriptions for Ambien were written in 2007? This number is down from the 26 million (2) prescribed in 2005.
“I feel like case loads are too large; that the doctor-patient relationship doesn’t get the chance to blossom over time. Doctors are very rushed. They typically have between three to five minutes with each patient day to day. So it’s much easier to prescribe medication than it is to get to know their patient,” said David Andrews, who is a clinical addiction counselor and therapist who has been working with addiction for years. His work with the Denver homeless and the Brighton police department has allowed him to experience not just addictions that deal with alcohol and illegal substances, but with Ambien and other sleeping medications. “I do think that [Ambien] is too freely prescribed,” he said.
Most of us have heard about someone, or maybe know someone (or have experienced ourselves) something strange while under the influence of Ambien. Most recently, sleep-eating has gotten some attention as one of the most prominent side effects of the drug. While no conclusive evidence (according to drug manufacturer Sanofi-Aventis) has been reported to link Ambien and sleep-eating, several news reports have published case studies involving patients who have gained weight and wake up to find that they’ve eaten a large amount of food (3).
One story that caught my attention, is the story of Janet Makinen and the 100 other people involved in a class-action lawsuit against Sanofi-Aventis. The plaintiffs claim that Ambien has caused them to become overweight because of the sleep-eating that the drug causes. The 55 year-old Makinen, from Dade City, FL, claimed that she gained over 100 lbs. because of the amount of food that she would eat in these Ambien-induced frenzies. Makinen claims her husband started hiding food, and would occasionally find her with food stuffed in her mouth in bed and he would have to dig it out (4).
Really? After six years of taking Ambien, don’t you think she might’ve thought of a way to prevent herself from eating? I believe completely that Ambien caused the sleep-eating, but to go six years and 100 lbs. without some kind of attempt to lock the food away seems unrealistic. This seems to me to be like the lawsuit filed against McDonald’s, where the plaintiffs complained that McDonald’s food was making them fat.
Why couldn’t the husband lock the refrigerator and hide the key? How about locking the cabinets in the same way? Sure it costs some money, but this is typical America: blame someone else because you got big and fat…sue ‘em for a million dollars. I feel a patriotic tear rolling down my cheek.
After hearing these stories, I decided it might be fun to document my own experiences with the drug.
April 14th: Don’t take while or before driving, check. Take one nightly before bed, check. Don’t take with alcohol (pouring the rest of my Corona down the sink drain)…check. I did manage to get some sleep on Sunday night, so I am only one day in the negative as far as sleeplessness goes. I don’t know what time it is…the clock in my living room says 2 a.m. That can’t be right. Fifteen minutes and one episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force later: I feel nice and cozy, kind of like tiny warm blankets wrapped around all of my nerve endings. There’s a definite distortion in my visual abilities, and I am pretty sure that it wouldn’t normally take me three minutes to type this last sentence. I think this stuff works, I am off to bed.
The next day, the headache was present, but not bad. It felt great to get so many consecutive hours of sleep. I already felt spoiled, my body felt so good, but craved for more sleep. I felt like I had been asleep for two days, because I can’t really remember the last time I got seven hours of sleep in one night.
April 15th: The pill took longer to hit my system, and it seems to have lost some of that nice, cozy feeling. I can still feel the warmth and comfort that this pill provides, but the keys on this keyboard look foreign to me. It feels as though the words are being judged as I type them, as they appear on the screen, even though in the deepest part of my mind I know that’s absurd because I am the only one here. The monitor strikes me as some kind of forum—some place where these words are going to show off and be evaluated…this is their arena, but it’s still not clear who the judge is. Not me…in fact, I am not certain of what my role in this is at all. This isn’t normal; I’m going to bed.
This night I woke up after about five hours, and struggled the rest of the night to sleep. I still felt better than I have, and five hours felt a lot more normal to my body than seven. Hopefully not a sign of things to come.
April 16th: The girlfriend is over and she is looking at me like I am crazy with my head tilted, following the words across the screen as I type them. That warm and cozy feeling is all gone now. I still feel on odd sense of judgment and display in the words I am typing in this log, and my brain is scattered in a fairly pleasant way. In the last half hour while waiting for sleep, I wrote a strange story. I can’t tell if it’s good or bad, I’ll let you know tomorrow. But where is the sleep? Thank you Ambien for the two days of sleep you gave me. I am going to try to make myself sleep.
Easier said than done. This night I got maybe an hour of sleep before the restlessness that I am so accustomed to set in and took over my legs, fingers and head. It felt like my fingertips were on fire. I thought they were numb at first from lying wrong, but the tingling didn’t go away. And the story I wrote was…interesting. Insanely idiotic, but interesting. It was some ill-conceived story about a group of weirdoes who capture a lamb with the intentions of making rack of lamb. Someone messed something up, because the lamb was literally shackled to a rack, as in the medieval torture device. Yikes. Well, we can stow away the hopes of being a famous comedy writer. It’s Thursday, and I have to work a full day and then go to band practice. Starbucks is my friend today.
April 17th: Well I intended to do seven days, so I am going to do seven days. The girlfriend brought over her own bottle of Ambien tonight (which she was prescribed as easily as I was). I have to take more than one tonight if I plan to sleep. I am going to have to up the ante and take two. My tolerance is already too high. The bottle says take one, but that must not be accounting for body weight and tolerance and metabolism and such things. We each took two pills and were sitting on the couch watching a DVR’d episode of “The Simpsons.” There’s a word that wasn’t around in 1990…”DVR’d.”
That warm and cozy feeling is back! This time, though, the feeling is accompanied by much, much more distracting mind effects. It is taking me forever to type the most simple sentence. I am not too interested in this log right now, but I know I will feel better tomorrow if I write this down. I don’t feel like sleeping, either. In fact, I feel quite awake. The words on the screen are distorting, in and out, closer together and further apart. Even though I haven’t experienced any of the sleepwalking, sleep-eating, or any other sleep events, I definitely get the impression that this drug was not formulated for the chemistry in my brain.
This is exhausting typing like this, and I feel an even stronger sense that these words are competing for some kind of attention right now as I write them. This screen is where the words get to come to life, I bring them to life, but I am not the judger. What? I don’t want to type but I need to get across this sensation. The girlfriend is asking me “Who’s here? Who is here watching us?” And I am wondering too, but I think that’s crazy. I think we are the only ones here, but I better check upstairs.
Later that night, after falling asleep for a few short minutes, I came downstairs to find my girlfriend asleep on the couch. I don’t really recall how or why we ended up in separate places. I called her name and tried to nudge her awake. No response. My head was still cloudy because of the Ambien, so I couldn’t tell if she was breathing well, or if her heart was beating the right way. I knew that she was breathing, and I knew that her heart was beating, but I couldn’t decide if these respiratory and heart rates were normal. I tried to nudge her awake again, harder. Nothing. Then even harder, and I called her name louder. Nothing. This was confusing. Not just because I had a head full of Ambien, but also because I wasn’t sure why she wouldn’t respond in the slightest way to me even though she was breathing and had a pulse.
“Amanda!” I yelled at her with a deep voice. No response. I shook her and tried to open her eyelids, but nothing would wake her. I splashed cold water on her face, and I brought an ice cube from the freezer to run down her neck and shirt. Not even a twitch. Whether or not I looked crazy or stupid, or was going to have to answer a bunch of questions about why I took more than the recommended dose of Ambien, I needed to call an ambulance. I explained the situation as best I could to the 911 dispatcher. Within 15 minutes, the paramedics were at the door. What a scene in my nosey little neighborhood. I could feel the prying eyes of snoopy neighbors all around.
After checking her vitals and asking me about the night, the paramedics advised me that she might be in what was called an “Ambien Coma.” This, they said, is a fairly typical reaction to Ambien. They stayed for about fifteen minutes to verify whether or not transport to the hospital would be necessary. After about sixteen minutes, Amanda started to respond to physical stimulation. There was no vocal response the rest of the night, however. The paramedics said that since she was responding, there was no need to take her to the hospital. They told me there were a lot more questions to answer at the hospital, and if that could be avoided, that’d be for the best.
The next morning, Amanda woke up. She told me that she thought she was awake the whole time, talking to me surrounded by some warm purple light. She said she heard every word I said, and every word the paramedics had said. I was just glad that she hadn’t gone brain dead on me. And despite the fact that I had taken two Ambien that night, I didn’t sleep again for obvious reasons.
They have this policy at work. Something about coming in on time and showing up. I don’t’ know. My supervisor and manager called me into the office and sat me down to have a talk with me. The insomnia had made me appear aloof. This is frustrating to your boss when he’s trying to reprimand you for attendance. My performance in school was slipping. My performance in work had dropped off the charts. So, after some “subtle” nudging, I decided to make use of my new insurance and head to the doctor$.
I realize that doctors are busy folks, but there’s something about two minutes of diagnosis that seems lazy. Before I could even crinkle the butcher paper on the cold exam table, I had a prescription for Ambien in my hot little hand$.
If doctors are supposed to consider the healthiest options for their patients, then does it seem strange that 16 million prescriptions for Ambien were written in 2007? This number is down from the 26 million (2) prescribed in 2005.
“I feel like case loads are too large; that the doctor-patient relationship doesn’t get the chance to blossom over time. Doctors are very rushed. They typically have between three to five minutes with each patient day to day. So it’s much easier to prescribe medication than it is to get to know their patient,” said David Andrews, who is a clinical addiction counselor and therapist who has been working with addiction for years. His work with the Denver homeless and the Brighton police department has allowed him to experience not just addictions that deal with alcohol and illegal substances, but with Ambien and other sleeping medications. “I do think that [Ambien] is too freely prescribed,” he said.
Most of us have heard about someone, or maybe know someone (or have experienced ourselves) something strange while under the influence of Ambien. Most recently, sleep-eating has gotten some attention as one of the most prominent side effects of the drug. While no conclusive evidence (according to drug manufacturer Sanofi-Aventis) has been reported to link Ambien and sleep-eating, several news reports have published case studies involving patients who have gained weight and wake up to find that they’ve eaten a large amount of food (3).
One story that caught my attention, is the story of Janet Makinen and the 100 other people involved in a class-action lawsuit against Sanofi-Aventis. The plaintiffs claim that Ambien has caused them to become overweight because of the sleep-eating that the drug causes. The 55 year-old Makinen, from Dade City, FL, claimed that she gained over 100 lbs. because of the amount of food that she would eat in these Ambien-induced frenzies. Makinen claims her husband started hiding food, and would occasionally find her with food stuffed in her mouth in bed and he would have to dig it out (4).
Really? After six years of taking Ambien, don’t you think she might’ve thought of a way to prevent herself from eating? I believe completely that Ambien caused the sleep-eating, but to go six years and 100 lbs. without some kind of attempt to lock the food away seems unrealistic. This seems to me to be like the lawsuit filed against McDonald’s, where the plaintiffs complained that McDonald’s food was making them fat.
Why couldn’t the husband lock the refrigerator and hide the key? How about locking the cabinets in the same way? Sure it costs some money, but this is typical America: blame someone else because you got big and fat…sue ‘em for a million dollars. I feel a patriotic tear rolling down my cheek.
After hearing these stories, I decided it might be fun to document my own experiences with the drug.
April 14th: Don’t take while or before driving, check. Take one nightly before bed, check. Don’t take with alcohol (pouring the rest of my Corona down the sink drain)…check. I did manage to get some sleep on Sunday night, so I am only one day in the negative as far as sleeplessness goes. I don’t know what time it is…the clock in my living room says 2 a.m. That can’t be right. Fifteen minutes and one episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force later: I feel nice and cozy, kind of like tiny warm blankets wrapped around all of my nerve endings. There’s a definite distortion in my visual abilities, and I am pretty sure that it wouldn’t normally take me three minutes to type this last sentence. I think this stuff works, I am off to bed.
The next day, the headache was present, but not bad. It felt great to get so many consecutive hours of sleep. I already felt spoiled, my body felt so good, but craved for more sleep. I felt like I had been asleep for two days, because I can’t really remember the last time I got seven hours of sleep in one night.
April 15th: The pill took longer to hit my system, and it seems to have lost some of that nice, cozy feeling. I can still feel the warmth and comfort that this pill provides, but the keys on this keyboard look foreign to me. It feels as though the words are being judged as I type them, as they appear on the screen, even though in the deepest part of my mind I know that’s absurd because I am the only one here. The monitor strikes me as some kind of forum—some place where these words are going to show off and be evaluated…this is their arena, but it’s still not clear who the judge is. Not me…in fact, I am not certain of what my role in this is at all. This isn’t normal; I’m going to bed.
This night I woke up after about five hours, and struggled the rest of the night to sleep. I still felt better than I have, and five hours felt a lot more normal to my body than seven. Hopefully not a sign of things to come.
April 16th: The girlfriend is over and she is looking at me like I am crazy with my head tilted, following the words across the screen as I type them. That warm and cozy feeling is all gone now. I still feel on odd sense of judgment and display in the words I am typing in this log, and my brain is scattered in a fairly pleasant way. In the last half hour while waiting for sleep, I wrote a strange story. I can’t tell if it’s good or bad, I’ll let you know tomorrow. But where is the sleep? Thank you Ambien for the two days of sleep you gave me. I am going to try to make myself sleep.
Easier said than done. This night I got maybe an hour of sleep before the restlessness that I am so accustomed to set in and took over my legs, fingers and head. It felt like my fingertips were on fire. I thought they were numb at first from lying wrong, but the tingling didn’t go away. And the story I wrote was…interesting. Insanely idiotic, but interesting. It was some ill-conceived story about a group of weirdoes who capture a lamb with the intentions of making rack of lamb. Someone messed something up, because the lamb was literally shackled to a rack, as in the medieval torture device. Yikes. Well, we can stow away the hopes of being a famous comedy writer. It’s Thursday, and I have to work a full day and then go to band practice. Starbucks is my friend today.
April 17th: Well I intended to do seven days, so I am going to do seven days. The girlfriend brought over her own bottle of Ambien tonight (which she was prescribed as easily as I was). I have to take more than one tonight if I plan to sleep. I am going to have to up the ante and take two. My tolerance is already too high. The bottle says take one, but that must not be accounting for body weight and tolerance and metabolism and such things. We each took two pills and were sitting on the couch watching a DVR’d episode of “The Simpsons.” There’s a word that wasn’t around in 1990…”DVR’d.”
That warm and cozy feeling is back! This time, though, the feeling is accompanied by much, much more distracting mind effects. It is taking me forever to type the most simple sentence. I am not too interested in this log right now, but I know I will feel better tomorrow if I write this down. I don’t feel like sleeping, either. In fact, I feel quite awake. The words on the screen are distorting, in and out, closer together and further apart. Even though I haven’t experienced any of the sleepwalking, sleep-eating, or any other sleep events, I definitely get the impression that this drug was not formulated for the chemistry in my brain.
This is exhausting typing like this, and I feel an even stronger sense that these words are competing for some kind of attention right now as I write them. This screen is where the words get to come to life, I bring them to life, but I am not the judger. What? I don’t want to type but I need to get across this sensation. The girlfriend is asking me “Who’s here? Who is here watching us?” And I am wondering too, but I think that’s crazy. I think we are the only ones here, but I better check upstairs.
Later that night, after falling asleep for a few short minutes, I came downstairs to find my girlfriend asleep on the couch. I don’t really recall how or why we ended up in separate places. I called her name and tried to nudge her awake. No response. My head was still cloudy because of the Ambien, so I couldn’t tell if she was breathing well, or if her heart was beating the right way. I knew that she was breathing, and I knew that her heart was beating, but I couldn’t decide if these respiratory and heart rates were normal. I tried to nudge her awake again, harder. Nothing. Then even harder, and I called her name louder. Nothing. This was confusing. Not just because I had a head full of Ambien, but also because I wasn’t sure why she wouldn’t respond in the slightest way to me even though she was breathing and had a pulse.
“Amanda!” I yelled at her with a deep voice. No response. I shook her and tried to open her eyelids, but nothing would wake her. I splashed cold water on her face, and I brought an ice cube from the freezer to run down her neck and shirt. Not even a twitch. Whether or not I looked crazy or stupid, or was going to have to answer a bunch of questions about why I took more than the recommended dose of Ambien, I needed to call an ambulance. I explained the situation as best I could to the 911 dispatcher. Within 15 minutes, the paramedics were at the door. What a scene in my nosey little neighborhood. I could feel the prying eyes of snoopy neighbors all around.
After checking her vitals and asking me about the night, the paramedics advised me that she might be in what was called an “Ambien Coma.” This, they said, is a fairly typical reaction to Ambien. They stayed for about fifteen minutes to verify whether or not transport to the hospital would be necessary. After about sixteen minutes, Amanda started to respond to physical stimulation. There was no vocal response the rest of the night, however. The paramedics said that since she was responding, there was no need to take her to the hospital. They told me there were a lot more questions to answer at the hospital, and if that could be avoided, that’d be for the best.
The next morning, Amanda woke up. She told me that she thought she was awake the whole time, talking to me surrounded by some warm purple light. She said she heard every word I said, and every word the paramedics had said. I was just glad that she hadn’t gone brain dead on me. And despite the fact that I had taken two Ambien that night, I didn’t sleep again for obvious reasons.
