Oh, hello 4:30

    A few years ago when I started this blog, I did so because I was at one of the most difficult times of my life. After years as a closeted observer of the transgender world I had been forced out into the open by a very physical manifestation of my problem: I had lost the ability to sleep. The stress of it all had made itself felt in an extremely inconvenient manner.
    It took me several months and the help of medication to regain my equilibrium, and about a year before I could come off the medication without reverting to insomnia.
    It's given me a legacy I'd prefer not to have, every time I wake up at an unfeasibly early hour I worry that I've fallen back into that particular pit. Like today, sitting in bed wide awake since sometime after 4am. Same night time city noises as three years ago, the trains and the church clock, just a slightly older me with an Android tablet rather than a Windows laptop.
    There's something Jobesque happening here. Facial pain, now this. At least thus far there has been a complete lack of boils and pestilence.

Leaking here and there

   They say some people become like their animals, and I certainly know enough middle-aged British women who resemble their horses to give some credibility to that.
    I by comparison have started to resemble my car. Just as I have picked up a miserable cold and am leaking into a constant stream of tissues, so the Wreck has done something unfortunate to its internals and has started leaking oily soot from its exhaust pipe on startup. That coupled with an alarming consumption of oil tells me that a piston ring may have given up the fight against age, allowing oil to find its way into an upper cylinder.
    All I have to do is wait and the cold will go away. Sadly the Wreck will need considerably more attention, I may try to nurse it over to C's house for a diagnostic session, and then some intensive and fiddly rebuilding effort may be called for. Remind me again why I have this machine? Oh yes, it's fun to work on. Damn. Serious car nut, me.
    It's difficult to feel like anything but a very scruffy bloke when you are under the weather with a nasty cold. Particularly as there is an interaction between my sleep and cold medications that means I can either sleep, breathe easily, or do both and risk liver damage. I chose breathing easily last night, tonight I think I need to sleep.
    Current woes are masking a more long-term and annoying realisation, that I am not winning here. I am not happy in my daily life and have not been so for months, and it is that unhappiness rather than the fact of my being trans that my wife finds upsetting, it preys on her and makes her unhappy too.
    As always, no surrender.
    I was disappointed yesterday to read in a blog comment the suggestion that we who resist transition perhaps don't actually need to change sex. I guess you gotta love the girl you married enough to live the dream, to understand.

Ending it all

    The other night, I very nearly shot myself. Before you become too concerned, it was one helluva weird dream. The usual one about going to the GIC and coming away with a prescription instead of the words I'll be given in reality, except with the weird twist that the prescription gave me hallucinations: that I could reach through solid objects as though they were jelly. Yes, you don't want to venture between my ears, it gets pretty odd in there.
    Anyway, the final plotline involved my taking a handgun and being about to shoot myself in the head, at which point the hardware interrupt triggered by what passes for self-preservation subroutines in a human brain kicked in and I was dragged abruptly into wakefulness, the dark and quiet of a very early morning, my wife slumbering peacefully beside me. Probably the only reason I can so vividly remember the events of my dream; when I wake up at normal pace any recollections are hazy.
    Other people might shrug off such an experience as just a bad dream. Forget it, turn over and go back to sleep. But this one stuck with me because I've been there, I know I have that capability within me and having banished that particular demon I am particularly keen not to grant it re-admission.
    I never went as far as choosing my preferred exit route, back when I was deep in the closet. It certainly wouldn't have been a handgun, leaving aside the British legal framework which makes them almost impossible to own legally I wouldn't have the first idea how to use one. I'm guessing most Americans know more about cricket than I know about handheld firearms. Television drama has taught me that handguns have about a thousand rounds in their magazines and never need reloading though, and that every shot from a police handgun is a lucky one with pinpoint accuracy being preserved no matter the distance, visibility or wind.
    Instead, I found myself planning. How would I leave my affairs in order, how I might ensure my wife had a solid financial foundation. This became a constant refrain alongside the thoughts of suicide, which made things worse in a way, the last thing you need when you are suicidally depressed are money worries especially when you are on a sound financial footing.
    Having left all that behind it all seems rather stupid, looking back. But the experience never completely goes away, there is always that worry somewhere not far below the surface that it might return. My wife and I agree that if I fall down that particular hole again then saying the right things to the folks at the GIC and embarking on the road to transition would be my only option, but risking one's life in that way to get there does not seem like a sensible path.
    Gosh, what a morbid post! My apologies. It's been something of a brain-dump. I'm not going back there so no worries, but when your unconscious mind confronts you with these things you have to work them through.

Having your candle burned at both ends

    Things have been a little quiet here of late, haven't they. I'd love to lay the blame on the ceaseless social whirl of a mad lifestyle that leaves me simply too busy to sit down, but unfortunately nothing so exciting is to blame.
    No, my problem is my old friend insomnia, this time with an unpleasant twist. Previously I've always had few problems getting to sleep, my issue has been with waking up in the small hours. The recent twist has been that I'm finding myself unable to get to sleep in the first place. My candle is being burned at both ends and I'm fast descending into zombiedom. In the past I've spent early waking hours writing here, this time I'm just too tired to do that. It's not that my usual supply of things I'd like to write about has dried up, it's just that when presented with a keyboard I'm gazing at it blankly with a feeling of a head full of mashed potato. My medication isn't helping me just at the moment, something that happens from time to time for a few days.
    So my lucky doctor is probably going to be seeing me again before too long. Not so bad, I was encouraged to receive an email from him last week. It would seem I am no longer the only gender variant patient at his practice, and he was asking me for details of support resources that he could pass on. I gave him the Swindon support group, plus some online resources. I hope they help his patient or any other patients the practice has in the future, and maybe I will encounter then before long. It is encouraging to find that the practice are anxious to get it right for us.
   Previously when I have had insomnia attacks this severe I have kept going through. I am not convinced I have given my best at work by doing that so this time I may take a sick day from work to catch up on sleep if it continues. It's out of character for me, I think I could count my sick days of an entire career on my fingers, but I think it makes sense. Better to be more awake when I am at work than to be half asleep.

Sleep, tablets and depression

     Back at the end of January my doctor issued me with a prescription for an antidepressant as a sleep aid. Amitryptiline in low doses stops you waking up in the middle of the night as I was, it doesn't space you out as sleeping pills do and I am assured by my doctor it's not addictive. Going from several months of unrelenting insomnia to sleeping normally within a week meant it was a complete success, and I've taken it ever since. On the few occasions I've missed a dose the insomnia has returned instantly, so I know it's still necessary and still working.
    This week I had a couple of evening events at which I was likely to drink alcohol. Alcohol intake is not advised when taking amitryptiline, so I missed my dose for a couple of days. I was rather shocked by the mood change I experienced on the second day, strong GD and hovering on the edge of agitated depression. Nothing I haven't experienced before, but I'd not had it at that intensity this year.
    So I'm taking an antidepressant and it's helping to shield me from depression. Earth shattering news flash. Part of me dislikes being committed to taking a medication that might be unnecessary , I guess this tells me that this one's doing some good.
    I also can't say I'm that pleased to be in a position where I need medication for my brain to function normally, however I have the consolation that I'm in as good a mental form as I've ever been, at work I seem to be ticking the right boxes.
    I just wish I could tick all the right boxes at home.

That magic pill

    I've heard this more than once over time: "If you were given a magic pill that turned you into a genetic female, would you take it no matter the consequences?". I believe it's supposed to be some kind of test of how trans-whatever you are, if you wouldn't jump at it then you can't really be very serious about all this.
    If my doctor proffered such a pill, I'd be hellishly tempted. But I wouldn't take it there and then, not without my wife being on-side. When the consequences affect someone I care that much about, I just can't. Not without one hell of a fight.

    Obvious trans-lightweight me, not serious about it at all.

    If my doctor produced a pill that did the opposite, "Take this risk-free pill and it'll give you a bloke brain, make you a bloke, and happy to be so!", I'd take it without hesitation. Make it all go away, fit snugly into the life I already have? You bet! Not because now I want to be a bloke, or am particularly happy trying to be a bloke, but because to be rendered content with the excessively bloke-suitable physical lot I've been landed with would make both my life and that of those around me so much easier.

    Unfortunately Harry Potter does not work in my doctor's dispensary. All he can give me is antidepressants, sleeping pills and something that might or might not stop my hair falling out. And very fortunately for us, all but the insane fringe of the medical profession learned years ago that trying to change GD sufferers to fit something their brains were not made for just doesn't work.

    But in a make-believe world of magic pills, I'd still go for that last one. My commenter from a few posts ago would take that as conclusive proof of her assesment of me, but I don't care. For me the most important desire in all this is to simply make it all go away.

Slowing down at work

    With three days left at my current employer I should be pretty free of stress, but sadly it isn't working that way. The two customers I spend most time dealing with have both succumbed to the lethargy of high summer and don't seem to have got it that after Friday I'll be gone and though my colleague will be able to service my software they won't any more have direct access to the person who wrote it. So several things that really need to be done before I leave seem to be slipping by the wayside. I know on Friday they'll panic and I'll be expected to do a week's work in an afternoon. On top of that my wife's work has become liable to floods in heavy rain due to a blocked drain, so she's very stressed, spending her time glued to the BBC Weather service looking out for showers.
     As a result the level to which my GD has been annoying me has ramped up over the last few days, to the extent that last night I found myself unable to sleep despite having taken my sleep medication. A very weird sensation, the feeling of drugged sleepiness while simultaneously staying unable to succumb to it.
    So I'm not fit for much, back to being barely awake and girl fogged. It'll pass, but meanwhile it's extremely annoying.
    Fortunately I've been finding some time to play amid the fog. The image above is a QR code. If you're not familiar with them, it's a two-dimensional barcode. I'm interested in them at the moment because they are a quick and convenient way for someone like me to convey a piece of information to a mobile phone, the phone owner simply points their camera at the QR code and their scanning software automatically picks up the information.
    So I've been playing with Google Image Chart Editor and the Zxing QR code generator to explore the format. My application needs to pass a location to the phone user, something which should be easy but has slight annoyances (iPhones and Android phones behave slightly differently, for the curious).
    When I found myself scanning the barcodes on my groceries to see what information they contained I knew it was time to stop. Tesco tinned tomatoes, for the truly curious, are 000436408451. Fascinating!

The generic early morning GD post.

    Waking up crying's a new one, never done that before! Hey, that first sentence could be a lyric from Dolly Parton at her most sentimental!
     OK, back to square one. Girl dreams, insomnia, the works. It's cumulative stress that's to blame, from work, family and life in general.
     Sitting in our flat with the curtains drawn you can hear the city waking up, if you are a seasoned observer as I am you can make a pretty good guess at what time it is from noise alone. The main road noise never completely goes away but rises gently from its night-time low while the trains all start their engines and sit idling from about five o'clock.
     I feel a little disappointed to have returned to this position. I could have made this post months ago, I thought I'd moved on from then and conquered the sleeplessness. Time to focus on the good stuff. And make some tea.

Hit the buffers

    I guess it had to come after so much happening in such a short time. I've hit the buffers, I need a rest, my creative fire has been all but extinguished. Code has not flowed easily from my keyboard, a couple of promising blog posts have languished half-written in the Blogger back-end, and I need to get some serious sleep.
    In a short while I'll be launching into the madness of a British trunk road at rush-hour, I think I'll make a detour on my way home to pick up some comfort food. I feel as if I've earned it. I've come a hell of a long way in the last couple of weeks.

The plus side

    Being an insomniac can be rather annoying. But at this time of year waking up at 4:30 in the morning brings an unexpected bonus, as I found this morning when I was once more robbed of sleep after an insomnia-free week. Why? Being nearly the longest day of the year meant that my city was bathed in rose-coloured early morning sunlight. So I went for a walk. It didn't banish the girl fog, but an hour wandering the deserted streets beat half an hour on the exercise bike any time!

Up and down

   It's some crazy-early hour of the morning, a GD dip has robbed me of the ability to sleep, I feel all groggy from the sleep medication and something I ate last night has given me gas. Too Much Information? Hell yeah!
   Something happened that made me laugh yesterday morning. I went to see my doctor for a repeat prescription. I had one or two questions for him, all of which he was able to answer. One of them concerned hair loss medication. Finasteride. I'm by no means going bald, but I've reached that time of life at which my hairline is starting to recede a little. It occurs to me that someone in my position would be better served by hanging on to a decent head of hair while they still have it, hence the question. I doubt that my doctor has many male patients who are unconcerned when told that a side effect in two percent of patients is gynaecomastia.
   I nearly came out to my boss last night. It's time for the Long Chat at work. He'd had a rough night being woken by his baby daughter though so I thought I'd try to catch him in a better frame of mind. That's going to be one of those conversations that just isn't going to be easy because though he's a decent bloke he hails from a very plain-speaking Scandinavian country and unfortunately his main exposure to anything remotely transgendered comes from holidays in Thailand. How to you explain that the more "colourful" aspects of Thai society that you've heard him talking about are very different in a cultural sense from a medical condition that's ripping your brain apart? I hope he has the good sense to engage brain before letting his jaw flap because I fear he may say something he regrets later. Fortunately I'm not too sensitive but it would be unfortunate, to say the least.
   Sadly my wife is having a bit of a hard time of it just at the moment. I think the idea of accompanying me dressed to a support group meeting is weighing on her mind, and her comfort zone is undergoing a slight contraction. I can't blame her, this isn't in the user guide for Being A Wife, but it has made for some fraught moments. Though I would prefer to be en femme I'll go along as bloke if she'd prefer that but unfortunately she's taking a dogged approach, insisting that I attend as planned even though she's not entirely happy with it. As has happened before, once it is over and has gone smoothly I think she will be more relaxed in that particular direction. I'm certainly not anxious to push her envelope.
   So I guess you could say these are Interesting Times. I just wish I could sleep through them.

The analogue computer of sleep

    In the days before ubiquitous digital computing, British academics modeled the flow of cash within our economy using water. They had an analogue computer, an assemblage of tanks, pipes and valves representing the different economic components and filled with water that represented the money. The idea was that a skilled operator could keep the whole machine running smoothly without any tanks running dry or overflowing, and the knowledge thus gained would allow the same operator to advise the Government on how to avoid the same fate befalling the country.
    Of course, it's never that easy. Like a music hall performer spinning plates on sticks, eventually they lose control of part of the cycle and something goes wrong. The academic could flush their mistake down the drain, the politician would be voted out into the wilderness, blamed for the woes of a cyclical economy.
     I've been thinking about that analogue computer of late. I'm sure you could construct one to model sleep patterns in the transgendered brain. You have two inputs: GD which causes insomnia, and sleeping pills which stop the insomnia. Your effects are extreme tiredness causing a vicious cycle of more GD and insomnia, or alternately an accumulation of the medication over time causing a spaced-out blunting of your mental faculties. The desired result is a point at which you get enough sleep to preserve normal function and perform at work without sliding  back into the insomnia or becoming a drugged-up zombie unable to satisfactorily do your job.
     Curiosity made me plot a rough graph a while back. It had three lines: one for how annoying I felt GD that day, one for how well I slept, the last for how useful my brain was feeling. Looking at the jagged lines didn't give any amazing insight beyond the obvious fact that it all goes wrong every ten days or so and I get to see what the world looks like at 4AM for a few days.
     You could probably reach the same conclusion by looking at this blog. Early posting times: no sleep. This post began early, yesterday was a spaced-out day so no pill last night. If I'm really lucky I'll be able to look at today's troubles in the world of database manipulation with something more than confusion, but I'm not holding my breath.
     Fortunately my problems are relatively minor compared to those faced by the economists advising those who run the country. Faced as they were yesterday with the shock news that we've slipped in the rankings of the world's top restaurants. Move over Greece and the National Debt!

Get thee behind me, girl!

     Just when you think it's safe to breathe easy, it comes back and gets you. Yesterday afternoon my brain went walkabout. Have you seen it anywhere? Just when I needed it to help me deal with a tricky piece of array manipulation for a rather cool software problem on a sadly mundane product, it went on holiday. Perhaps it's trapped abroad by the ash cloud. In its place, girl fog, leading to the insomnia disregarding my pharmaceuticals and treating me to a lovely dawn chorus from the neighbourhood bird life and despite my best efforts disturbing my wife's sleep too. Now I've spent a morning slightly confused, implementing the fix to yesterday's software problem that I painstakingly thought out at four o'clock this morning. Something achieved, and the lift you get from at last having a piece of code that runs as it should certainly raises you out of the fog for a while.
    You have to focus on the good stuff on days like these. It's a lovely day outside, the cherry trees are in bloom and we're going round to a friend's  house this evening for a Chinese takeaway. On a blog like this one the following sentiment might seem a little odd, but get thee behind me girl, I need to work!
 

Fit note

    This morning saw me making an early trip to my doctor's surgery through a beautifully sunlit and deserted city for the first appointment of the day. I came away holding the thing I'd asked for, a fit note.
    Fit notes are an example of our government's penchant for meaningless re branding. We used to call then a "sick note", but to call someone "sick" is obviously not enabling enough, hence we now have the same piece of paper but with a different name.
    As it happens though it my case it's a good description. I wasn't looking for a pass to Easy Street, I'm very anxious to keep working. As an insomniac I'm concerned that the combination of alternate insomnia, girl fog and the cumulative effects of the anti-insomnia drugs have blunted my edge somewhat when it comes to doing my job. I make money with my brain, and when that brain goes walkabout half way through a thought that money-making ability is dented. My employer is really good and fortunately I seem to be at last reigning in the insomnia, but I feel it's still worth having the fit note to provide a legal cover for my arse in the event his patience runs out.
    My doctor was kind enough to describe the cause of my malady as "A hormonal imbalance awaiting the assessment of a specialist" Which is I guess the truth, sort of. And which neatly avoids my coming out at work. I'll leave the Long Chat with them until after I have a proper diagnosis in my hand.
    So I've officially joined the ranks of the Unwell. The sick, the infirm, the ailing, the ill. And I have the paper to prove it. Which is kind of weird, as I've almost never been more physically fit in my life.

Friday afternoon blues

    As an exercise in keeping ones brain active enough not to fall asleep either before the end of the working day or while driving through the Friday rush hour, writing a random blog post about nothing much at all doesn't really cut it. But the filter machine downstairs has been turned off for the weekend so there's no coffee left, the office is hot enough to cook pizza from the built-up white heat of technology and opening the window only brings the buzzing sound of an elusive two-stroke motor. So there's not much else I can do right now.
     Just what are they doing that requires a small two-stroke on a wet Friday anyway? No need for leaf blowing, it's March. Similarly they won't be grass cutting yet. Sounds far too constant for a chainsaw. Generator? Surely not one of those nasty little Chinese portable jobs with the chocolate bearings and the pre-glazed bore!
    My weekend will be spent variously spaced out on Zopiclone, racking last year's cider and fettling various rusty bits of farm machinery. Wet and rusty bits of farm machinery, that is. The BBC tells me we're due some light rain which is to say anything from a soft spring shower to a miserable drizzle. We Brits have many different words for our precipitation. Still, with luck I'll taste a little of last autumn's golden halo in the rough proto-cider I draw off the lees. If you're not a cider-phile then I can only describe the flavour I'm looking for as intensely pippy, as in apple pips.
    Whatever your weekend brings you, I hope you sleep well.

Spoke too soon

    Last week it seemed as though insomnia was beaten and I could look forward to life without tiredness. Wake-up time was heading past 6 o'clock and all seemed well. Shame it didn't turn out that way.
    So I'm back to waking up around four o'clock. It's been four nights in a row now, since Friday. Amitryptiline doesn't seem to touch it just at the moment and I hate the spaced feeling from Zopiclone, but I may just have to put up with it.
    Left alone in the dark with only my gender issues for company, not a good place to be. I have three choices, keep my wife awake with my restlessness, try to read something and fall asleep, or get up and waste some time on the PC. I've settled on reading, as the most comfortable. Kathy Reichs is an author I've only recently discovered, plenty of back catalogue to get through. Her heroine is like Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote, everywhere she goes, people meet untimely and violent ends. The moody cop character should figure out that she's the common thread in all these crimes and lock her up.
    It's upsetting, not being able to deal with insomnia. I have that terrible feeling again of being on a slow but steady descent into a world beyond my control, and I don't like it. Screwing up my own life is one thing, doing the same for my wife is unacceptable.
    I am however pleased to notice the earlier dawn as the season changes. Within a few weeks even with daylight saving it'll be light not long after I wake up. My city can be very beautiful in the early morning and I should take full advantage of the opportunity to see it.

Insomnia almost beaten

    Since my current brush with insomnia seems to be drawing to a close it's worth noting down some of the various different strategies I've employed to combat it over the years.
    Lack of sleep has been a recurring feature of my life for well over twenty years now. An episode is usually triggered by a change in routine, an upsurge in my gender issues or something more traditional like the jetlag from a transatlantic flight. I will normally have no problems getting to sleep in the evening, the insomnia manifests itself as an early wake-up and an inability to return to sleep. This can last for anything from a few days to a few weeks, the exception being my most recent episode which has lasted nearly three months and led to my seeking medical help.
    There have been several strategies I've employed to overcome it. Over the counter pharmaceutical sleep aids, herbal sleep aids, guided meditations. What I've learned is that there is no magic bullet for every episode and that sometimes the pill that cures one will not work on the next. My option of last resort has been valerian tablets, herbal pills available from most pharmacists. They smell foul, but a couple of those have usually been enough to see me through to the morning. They have been particularly useful in jetlag induced episodes.
    One thing is worth mentioning because it doesn't work, a recurring suggestion from other people is that getting drunk would solve it. It doesn't. Waking up at 2 AM drunk, or worse still hung over, is worse than waking at the same time sober. A drunken stupor might help some people get to sleep, but it has no effect on when you wake up.
    In the last few months I've been using prescription drugs as sleep aids. My doctor may need a little education when it comes to gender variance issues but he seems on steadier ground with insomniacs. Zopiclone was brilliant for finally giving me some sleep but left me completely spaced out the next day so I came back and asked for something a bit milder. The resulting prescription, a low dose of amitriptyline, has been mostly successful in wrapping up this episode.
    Prescription drugs though are not a long-term solution. My doctor tells me amitryptiline is not addictive and I have to believe him, however I have observed it does seem to be cumulative. Take it for more than four days and thereafter you're half asleep all day. Not good if you have a job. So I found myself on a four-days-on, three-days-off routine which meant I could never have a full week of sleep. Fortunately after a few weeks of this my waking time on the nights with no pill has crept later as it would have naturally in time, indicating the episode is drawing to a close.
   So this one looks like it's nearly over. Not before time I have to say. It's been the worst so far, seriously affecting my work, derailing a couple of personal projects and forcing me out of the closet at last. I'd have to laugh or something, if I wasn't so knackered.

Lesson learned

"Do not drink alcohol when using this medication"

I should have bourne the above warning on the packaging in mind before taking my sedative last night about an hour after a pint and a half of real ale. This morning's workout was truncated through dizziness, now my head is full of mashed potato.

Stupid. Lesson learned.