Medication Side-Effects

I wrote in my last post about my health issues and triumphs, but I didn't mention the fact that I haven't slept more than an hour and a half, a night, in weeks!!! I go to bed feeling exhausted and toss and turn all night, wide awake. My last doctor visit, I complained about this and he wrote me a prescription for a sleep aide, we have all heard of from TV, Ambien. When I get my prescriptions filled they always give me the generic version when possible. Because these generic versions have different, wierd names, I always read the information the pharmicist gives to me about the drugs, mainly to know which is which, and to understand exactly what each medication is for and what it does. I did this with the Ambien. I read all the side effects of this drug, which we all know they just have to tell you about, they never "Really" happen!!!!! We read or hear the side effects of a drug we are fixing to take but somehow we feel the chances of those actually happening to us would be like one in a zillion!!!! That information is just statistics. We would "never" be a statistic. We somehow forget that what brought us to using the drug in the first place has probably already made us a "statistic"!!! hee hee!!!! Anyway, armed with this knowledge and feeling as if sleep was an extremely important quality of life I was missing, I began taking the drug, nightly. The info. clearly states to only take the medication when you "can devote seven to eight hours to sleep". HA!!! The drug would put me to sleep fairly quickly, but, I would again be wide awake in an hour and a half. So.... One night last week, I took the pill and went to bed as usual. As usual I woke up an hour and a half later, right on schedule. I had been so wore out, I thought, "I am not going to do this tonight!!! If one pill only puts me to sleep for an hour and a half, another pill could not possibly harm me!!! What's the worse that could happen? I sleep for four hours straight?" So I took another pill......
The next day I woke up thinking well, that worked pretty well and I felt pretty good. So I went about my daily buisness. I went to get the store paper work ,that Jess would have brought home the night before after I had went to bed, and I couldn't find it anywhere. It wasn't in the normal place so I asked Wendell were it was? Had Jess brought it home? He said yes she had brought it home and he had put it where we always keep it until I get time to deal with it. Frustrated, and thinking he was crazy, after all it didn't have legs to move it's self, I went to get my books and found the paper work from the day before was done. It was all recorded in my handwriting, although sloppier than usual. The only mistake I found was I had recorded one thing twice. My mind went back to that other pill and the medication information I had read about the impossible, possible side effects!!! The info. stated that Ambien has been known to, in rare cases, cause people to do things in their sleep that they don't know they are doing!!!! I have absolutely NO memory of getting up and doing that paper work. Even after the fact, most times you can look back and remember parts of things, I remember nothing about that night after taking that second pill. The paer work would have took me fourty five minutes to an hour to do and I cannot remember doing any of it. I asked Wendell and the girls if they had known I was up or seen me up that night. Wendell said no, he didn't wake up. Kiah said she woke up at about one thirty a.m. and I had the lights on. Punky said she woke up at one thirty seven a.m. and I was up. She said I had every light in the house on and was making all kinds of noise. She said it was making her angry that I was "beating and banging" on everything and not even trying to be quiet while everyone else slept!!! She said she almost got up but didn't. I wish she would have, that could have been interesting!!!
That night I took an Ambien before bed thinking, oh well, I'll only take one, I'll never take two again. After taking that pill, however, I got scared thinking of all the possibilities. I made Wendell get up and hide the guns somewhere I didn't know about. I was afraid my subconcious would be thinking about guns or something and I would do something else in my sleep. Needless to say, I quit taking the Ambien that night, and am back to being unable to sleep.
I quess when doctors pescribe drugs for us we just take them, almost blindly. That won't be the case with me anymore. It really scares me that I could have done all that in my sleep and still have ABSOLUTELY NO MEMORY of that night's happenings!!!