to excess

I sometimes have a problem falling asleep--not for lack of being tired, mind you, but I get into that loop where I am thinking lots of thinks and my mind gets a-racing and next thing I know it's 1:00am and I have to wake up for work in four hours. So sometimes I will take 25mg of Benadryl to help things along. It's just a Tylenol PM without the Tylenol, not habit-forming (so far as I know--maybe some smart neuroscientist among you can tell me if there have been any long-term studies on upregulation of central muscarinic receptors after long-term antihistamine use for whatever reason--but like I said, so far as I know) and man, it works.

I still remember when I was hospitalized in medical school for peritonitis--it's a long story but the short version is that I had appendicitis and they sent me home from the ER and my appendix perfed, which led to about a month of GOOD TIMES--and in the hospital I was prescribed IV Bendadryl prn for sleep. Most of the patients had the standard Ambien PRN reflexively penned into their charts by some dutiful little first-year resident (just like how every patient no matter what they were admitted for* is written for Tylenol PRN, because one less call from the floor for a Tylenol order is possibly one more minute of sleep before the next call from the floor) but since I was NPO (nothing by mouth, you know, because of my guts was all FULL OF PUS) I was written for IV Benadryl instead. I initially thought it was weird to be prescribed an antihistamine a sleep aid, but boy howdy, I am a believer now.

Anyway, I couldn't fall asleep last night, despite initial indications that I would barely be able to stay awake until midnight to ring in the New Year. Only instead of one 25mg Benadryl, for some reason, I took two. Not really sure why, but I'd been taking Benadryl for the past few days (Joe's Aunt Sue, with whom we were staying this week, has two cats that I was unfortunately allergic to--somewhat disgusting aside: I have been told that the major trigger for cat allergies is not so much the cat fur itself rather the cat spit, with which each cat hair is lovingly coating in the process of self-grooming, a factoid that I could have probably done without) and I figured...well, I don't know what I was thinking. Anyway, 25mg = good dose, 50mg = probably overkill. I barely even moved until 9:00am, which is very late for me, at which point the kids practically pried me out of bed with a crowbar. (An acoustic crowbar, but either way, it's metaphorical.)

Here's to hoping your New Year's Eve was less excessive than mine, I guess.

* Well, maybe not liver failure.