I’ve been on antibiotics since Friday afternoon, so I’ve now got 2 days worth of pills in me.  I’m tired, but my sleep schedule has been pretty messed up lately.  Have any of you ever seen a mouse or a hamster (or a rat, I suppose) slip while running on its wheel?  If they’re going the right speed, they kind of get thrown around in there like clothes spinning and bouncing around in a dryer.  That’s what my sleep schedule has been like lately – I’ll get it going reasonable for a day or two, and then it’ll get majorly screwed up again, and I’ll be thrown around for several days by that.  It doesn’t seem to matter whether I take the measured approach to fixing things (adjust by just a little bit at a time) or the radical approach to fixing things (either stay up a huge amount of time or knock myself out with sleeping pills, either way designed to get me asleep at the appropriate time).

This video gives you an idea of what I’m talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=buUKHggrhd4 (I wanted to embed it, but it looks like WordPress wants to charge $60/year to let me embed videos.  wtf, man?  I just want to embed ONE now, it’s not something I do a lot…grr)

That?  That’s what I feel like with my sleep schedule right now.  And I keep having to jump back on the wheel because, well, you can’t go without sleep.  Not to mention, a girl’s got to get to her doctor’s appointments and her classes.

I’m also dealing with what seem to be fairly typical Lyme symptoms.

Rage.  Oh my god the rage.  There are things going on that it’s perfectly normal to get annoyed about.  I’m not annoyed about them.  I want to verbally eviscerate my fiance because the house is messy.  The fact that he’s stressed out to the point of being somewhat emotionally fragile at the moment (which means that I feel like I should be more careful about snarling at him than usual) is producing a very counter-productive reaction: I’m even angrier and want to yell at him even more.  It’s at its worst late at night, which would of course be an especially bad time to yell at him because he’s an early riser and tends to be impressively incoherent when woken up in the middle of the night.

The screwed up sleeping schedule I mentioned is another typical Lyme symptom.

The forgetfulness is…I don’t have words for it.  I sometimes lose track of conversations mid-sentence.  I’ll be saying something and then all the sudden I have NO IDEA what I was saying.  It’s exasperating and it makes me look stupid.  It also frustrates the ever-loving crap out of me.  I also can’t remember anything I’m supposed to do, nor can I remember to ask my fiance to do things when he’s awake, which means that I crawl into bed at ungodly hours of the night and wake him up to ask him to do something, which he has trouble remembering (because the poor guy was asleep), which only adds to my rage issues.  Completely unfair, and I KNOW it’s completely unfair.  Which only makes me angrier.  *facepalm*

I suppose I should add a psychiatrist visit to my to-do list, to deal with the anger, and I know I need to see my sleep specialist, only I never remember when his office is open and I’m free to call.

All in all, the collateral damage from this damn infection is impressive and frustrating and ye gods do I need this thing to go away.  I mean, I’m not normally a tranquil person, and I tend to have bad sleep patterns and a bit of being scatterbrained, but this?  This is just absurd and unlivable.

About 3 days into the antibiotics, I started being more exhausted, but strangely there was less pain in my joints and muscles.  As I continued through the antibiotics, this continued – my joints and muscles felt better and better.

I got curious and googled to see if the antibiotic was one used to treat Lyme disease.  You see, my friend Sharon from the blog AfterGadget, who has chronic Lyme, pointed out a while ago that my symptoms sounded like Lyme.  Amoxicillin is the second-line drug used for treating acute Lyme disease.  The fact that I felt so much better pain-wise is, I think, the clincher on a clinical diagnosis of Lyme disease.  I haven’t had a lab test run yet, but to my mind that’s somewhat irrelevant.  You see, the lab tests for Lyme are impressively inaccurate and prone to false negatives – the studies say that the Western Blot test, which is the most commonly run test, gives false negatives to 30-50% of people who actually have Lyme.  There are better tests, but they’re only done by two labs.  I’ll be asking my doctor to write for one of those, but I already have the paperwork for a Western Blot (and my insurance covers testing 100%), so I’ll be getting it done anyhow.  The fact that it misses a lot of cases doesn’t mean it misses all cases, so it’s worth doing as it is less hassle than getting one of the other tests run.

I’m actually really happy about finding out I almost definitely have Lyme.  While it may take a couple of months to totally clear this out of my system, this is something that can go away.  To me, at least, this is enormously good news.  Way better than adding another hard to pinpoint, hard to manage condition like a variety of arthritis to my long list of diagnoses.

We’ve had a bit of a mouse problem here for the last several months.  Our house is pretty much spotless on food (everything is now in plastic tubs because the damn critters get into everything).  We’ve plugged mouseholes as we find them, we’ve set traps and killed a number of the little beasts, but still they come back.  We suspect one or both of our neighbors is less…rigorous…in their clean-up attempts.

Anyhow, the mouse problem is background.  It has turned up a funny tendency of Hudson’s – once he hears or sees something somewhere, he continues to expect it to be there, whether he has reason to or not.

Three hours ago, there was a mouse under the far end of the loveseat.  I heard it, and Hudson at least heard it – he may have also seen it.  He has periodically stared at or sniffed that end of the loveseat, and continues to do so, even though there has been no further evidence of mouse.  He’s just convinced that it must somehow still be there.  He does this ALL the time, and he’ll end up staring at places where nothing has happened for hours, as if he’s willing the mouse to return.

For a smart dog, he’s a real dummy sometimes!