I’ve always been tired. When I was a kid, and a teenager, I could tell how long we had until the school breaks by just how hard it was the get up in the morning. The closer we got to half term, the harder it would be, the slower I would wake, move, function.
I was an insomniac at 11, just completely unable to fall to sleep until gone midnight most nights. Which as an adult, probably doesn’t sound like much, but at 11, that’s a lot of sleep to be missing out on. That I continued to miss out on for years.
Back then no one really took me to the doctor to talk about it, I just didn’t sleep. I went to the doctor about other stuff, but I don’t think anyone really took the insomnia seriously. Even as a young adult, no one took it seriously.
When I was in my 20s I was tired because I was depressed. From the age of 16 my depression really took hold of me. The reasons for the trigger are obvious looking back; my dad was drinking more, I was failing my A-Levels and it spiralled into poor decisions and lifelong mental health problems. I wasn’t sleeping properly, but I wasn’t doing much else properly either. I was tired – emotionally and physically – of everything.
In my 30s – after some therapy and medication changes and moving back to Wales – things turned around. My mental health will always be ropey, and I have SAD – Seasonal Effective Disorder – but things were better. Then during lockdowns, I started to get really sleepy around 3pm. Really badly sleepy but couldn’t figure out why, nothing changed especially, I was sleeping a better even though my youngest did not sleep much (or at all really unless we were holding her). Then a blood test showed I was diabetic. Apparently, I’d been pre-diabetic since my gall bladder op but no one had thought to point this out. And I had no other symptoms of diabetes other than the intense sleepiness.
Then, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. The chronic pain, stiffness and fatigue and other symptoms I’d been dealing with since my youngest was diagnosed with cancer did not get better when she did. Like pandora’s box had been opened and the issues could not be contained anymore.
Now, it’s something else. I have low B12, low folate, low this, low that. I have to start B12 jabs, I take folic acid, it’s another tablet I add to the pill box. The B12 will be life long, I will always need it but I should feel better.
But there’s the problem. I should feel better. After every instance I should feel better and perhaps I do, but perhaps I just learning to cope with the limits that come along with each and every diagnosis.
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