insomnia

Insomnia is not fun. I notice that my daughter M had a case yesterday; last night was my turn. First I fell asleep again while watching Sunday night baseball on ESPN, They (Jon & Joe) really do a good job. Some week I'll have to stay awake and watch the whole show. Anyway, I fell asleep sort of in bed, propped up on a bunch of pillows. I woke up about 10:30, turned the TV off, brushed teeth etc, and went to bed. Pain. Severe discomfort in the gut. I tossed and turned for about 20 minutes, trying to find a comfortable position to no avail. Dr W told me I should take a oxycodone (5 mg) if I got a pain breakthrough, so I declared a breakthrough and took one. Went back to bed waited for things to ease. While waiting, I got to thinking about the kinetics of what was going on. I take a 10 mg time-release oxy every 12 hours. Rounding for clarity, that comes out to 1 mg per hour. So at the end of hour 1, I have 1 mg, 2 at the end of hour 2, etc until hour 5. Now I infer that the body metabolizes oxy in 5 hours. The directions for oxycodone say take every 4-6 hours. When I was taking it, before taking the time-release, the pain would wake me at night every 5 hours, more or less, to take more. So at the end of hour 6, 1 mg is gone and I have 5 in my system. As long as I take a 10 mg time-release every 12 hours, the concentration should stay at 5. When I take a 5 mg non time release, it doubles the concentration to 10, which is what I did.

So I'm thinking through this while waiting for the pain to subside. It does, no pain, I'm comfortable- but wide awake! All that thinking left the old brain spinning! (I also thought through the possible effect if the decrease follows first-order kinetics, as one would predict- no effect since first order implies the rate is inversely proportional to the concentration. Since the time release is keeping the concentration constant, the rate is constant too and does not effect the rest of the analysis.)

So I'm wide awake- and remain wide awake until 4 AM. Then I get up and watch CNN and compute some stuff for an hour or so, then go back to bed. I do finally get some sleep; the dog lets me sleep until 8. But I'm a little rocky right now. I foresee a nap later.

OK- query for the group- is it possible that the lack of sleep was caused by the extra oxy? Was I high on the oxy? Can it act as a stimulant under those conditions? There is nothing in the data sheets about that, and it never happened to me before when I took one at bedtime. I know this drug is the drug of choice for abuse, but I don't know what they get out of it.