Well, that sucked.

The Lunesta experiment ended after two days. The first day I slept mostly through the night… I woke up a few times but always got back to sleep. I did wake up with a terrible bitter taste in my mouth and a headache throughout the next day, and to be honest it might have been sheer exhaustion that made me sleep. The next night I took it, I woke up around three, was awake for most of the rest of the night, the bitter taste was a bazillion times worse, and I experienced the worst headache I have ever had in my entire life.

Making things more interesting was the fact that I had a particularly gnarly problem setting up an install in Morganton the next day; it took about four hours when it should have taken less than two, and I had to troubleshoot that issue while barely being able to think. The problem ended up being a bad-right-out-of-the-box router, and I did manage to resolve it — without letting on to the client that what I really wanted to do was curl up in a fetal position under her desk, whimpering. I came straight home and spent pretty much the rest of the day and night in bed, trying to lay down without my head actually touching anything, and concentrating on not vomiting. Everything looked all out of focus and shimmery and every noise felt like someone was trying to bore into my head with a screwdriver. Not fun.

The next day I looked up Lunesta side effects and found that both the headache and the bitter taste were known side effects, and I also found this site which pretty much scared me away from ever taking it again even if I hadn’t already been afraid of the headache.  Plan B was supposed to be a double dose of Ambien, which (at the lower dose) has previously done nothing for me, but I am sort of afraid of that too. And plan C involved another prescription of something much stronger that would probably leave me groggy afterwards.

I spent Thursday and Friday working in Tennessee and racked up over 24 hours between the two days, so last night not sleeping wasn’t an issue — I was completely wiped out.  Joy thinks we should use the overtime I’ve gotten the past few weeks to pay for an appointment with an accupunturist or something like that. I am not sure if that would help but at least it wouldn’t be tinkering with my brain chemistry. If nothing else, I think I’d rather feel like crap because I hadn’t slept than risk playing around with any more sedative/hypnotic drugs.