I'm staying awake because I'm afraid to fall asleep. I wake up so awfully depressed. Then I keep falling back asleep all day, until the evening. Then I feel pretty awake.

I'm starting to think I can't cope with taking care of my boyfriend. I'm letting his apartment get untidy. I'm not wanting to prepare meals, do dishes etc. I do get him fed somehow. A home attendant is here part of the day. I try to get the supper dishes done in the morning before she gets here. Mail is piling up. When the attendant is here, she stays in the living room with him. There's only two recliners there. So I stay in the bedroom all day. I wish she wasn't coming tomorrow. I'll end up staying in the bedroom all day.

I don't know what to do. I don't want to deprive her of her job and day's pay. After tomorrow, she won't be back until Monday. But each weekend I say I'm going to pull myself together . . . and I don't. She'll go to the laundromat tomorrow, so she'll be out for awhile. I don't know what to do. I'm trying to think by writing.

This tread, now, is more just for me to collect my thoughts on. I don't expect people to keep responding to the same old thing. I have to stop sliding downhill and have a plan to act sensible.

I did call that national hotline. I said I was not a danger to myself, but awful distressed. I'm afraid to tell my PCP how bad I feel because I'm afraid she might not continue my hydrocodone. Then that would be a fourth stressor on top of the three that I am hardly coping with now.

The three things: 1)The morning depression. 2)The tinnitus. 3)The oversleeping in the daytime, where I can't resist going back to sleep.

In addition there is the responsibility for taking care of my guy. But that can be good at times by giving me something constructive to do.

I have hydrocodone, baclofen and amitriptyline. The hydrocodone relieves back and neck pain. I live in constant fear of losing that prescription. The most I take is 10 mg twice a day. Rarely, I might take it three times in a day, if I was doing a lot of housework or heavy errands with lifting stuff. It might seem like my pain couldn't be that bad, if that's all I need. But, often I feel too sore to do anything until after I take it. Or I get partways through doing work and can't continue without a dose. It works great on my achiness and soreness. It makes me feel physically normal. Then I can be active at a close to normal level. It does, incidentally, often make me feel less depressed. But I don't usually take it for that effect. Being able to clean, and cook and shop make me feel pretty okay emotionally.

If I don't take my amitriptyline in the evening, I usually will not fall asleep all night. Nor will I fall asleep next day. Without that med I will tend to stay awake for 24 - 36 hours at a time. That has been true for decades. Even, as a kid, before I got that med, I would often stay awake that long. I would go to school with no sleep.

So I'm awake now and unlikely to get sleepy because I did not take that amitriptyline 50 mg last evening. Sometimes skipping a night of sleep and staying awake the next day helps me be less depressed. I did that several nights ago and it did help. I wish I had the discipline to keep a journal.

The baclofen seems to help me sleep. I was supposed to take it 3Xday for neck and back pain. It wasn't too good for pain, but more effective for making me sleepy. So I tend to not use it in the daytime. If I am well rested, hydrocodone does not make me sleepy at all. It makes me much more willing to become physically active by getting rid of soreness.

So I'm awake now because I'm afraid to go to sleep because, if I do, I believe I will wake up much more depressed than I am now. And right now the depression and anxiety has eased up to where it is bearable. Plus, when I wake from sleeping, the tinnitus seems particularly bad. When I'm posting, the effort of concentrating on writing makes the tinnitus less noticeable.

I'm kind of okay at this moment, but I don't know how I'm going to get through tomorrow. If I take no pills, I might be able to stay awake. In the daytime, I'll have to be doing something, or I will get depressed and anxious.

My thought was that, if a doctor would order me a stimulant, I might be able to get up after sleeping and do something that involves moving around. Otherwise, I wake up tired and do nothing and go back to sleep. If I could stay awake in the daytime without that nearly irresistable urge to sleep, I think I could get passed being so depressed.

If I explain all this to doctors, they might give me nothing and stop ordering the stuff I now get, to boot. So I'm afraid to talk to them. These days doctors might not want to order hydrocodone for a depressed person. What a dilemma.