Earth Abides

This is my first post deviating from the previous four years ... this will be entirely random, and my random thought today is that my daughter, Kathryn, just finished reading "Earth Abides", by George R. Stewart (no relation, I don't think?). This is a book I've had for a couple of years, and I've got an audio version of it (bought it first) and then a hard-copy, paperback version. I used to say that "East of Eden", by Steinbeck, was my favorite book. Now I'm not so sure. I've read and listened to "Earth Abides" three or four times now, and it never seems to get stale. Every time I listen/read this book I discover something new. It's a post-apocalyptic novel, but not in a zombie, burnt out future (Mad Max) kind of way.

A young grad student, Isherwood Williams, is up in the woods near San Francisco. He gets bitten by a rattlesnake, and cannot get off the mountain he's on and suffers through days of sickness. When he finally gets off the mountain, he discovers that he's all alone - everyone has died from some kind of pandemic while he's been in the back country. This is the story of his life after the event. Who he meets, how they form families and neighborhoods, how their offspring thrive (or not), and how he manages the slow disintegration of technology (while this novel was written in the 50's - it's amazing the amount of technology already around that people depend on - think power grid, flushing toilets, bullets, canned food). The book is epic in it's sweep of the new history, and chronicles Ish's entire life.

I don't know that I'm quite ready to replace "East of Eden" for this book, but I'm tempted.

Sleep - Part II

This has been extraordinarily frustrating. Just when I think I've got this issue resolved, I have another sleepless night. These aren't the odd night where you only manage 4-5 hours, but are the physically draining 0-2 hour marathon in bed. I'm trying to train myself to get up when I find myself awake for a half hour or more, but even that doesn't seem to help. As with the drug problem before, I can find no "common denominator" with what works and what doesn't. Seems that maybe if I'm not tired enough when I go to bed, I'm likely to have a sleepless night.

Regardless, this is now day 29 of this new "regimen" I'm on (SleepTracks, light in the morning, more activity during the day, getting up at the same time, going to bed later) and I would have hoped I'd retrained my brain by now ... apparently not. I'll keep on going for as long as it takes, since this appears to be the only successful way of tackling this problem. If I've suffered through this for the past year, what's a few more months?

Christmas 2010 Letter

The full Christmas 2010 Letter is available at Google Docs.

Merry Christmas!!
Doug

First Sleep

Today was the first morning in over a year where I felt well rested and not too drugged up. I finally gave in to the thought that my sleep would never improve with pharmaceuticals (Ativan) and, although I've tried to wean myself off it twice before (Ativan is a drug you have to very slowly (months) wean off of because of the physical dependency it builds and the severe side effects it can have). I will just have to admit that it will take some time - but my quality of sleep cannot suffer any longer. I started to do some research about sleep (I have no idea why it's taken me this long), and found out that there are millions of people out there just like me. The only cure is a purely holistic one, involving re-training your brain to associate day with wakefulness, and the bed with sleep. It's difficult to get the initial part (wakefulness) going in these northern climes, because there just isn't enough sunlight to trigger that effect in your brain (ie: sunlight = shut off melatonin production). I didn't know that your average living room would have maybe 75 or 100 lux of light hitting your eyes, while noon on a sunny day can be as much as 20,000 lux. No wonder the incidences of SAD in Canada are high (especially here in Vancouver, where you get months and months of grey). Regardless, I built myself a crude light box with 6 x 1300 lux flourescent bulbs, and am trying to eat breakfast with this horrendously bright light beside me. It should trigger my brain to recognize morning. In the night-time, I've learned about something called "prior wakefulness" - it's basically that "sleep pressure" builds up during the day, so that the longer you're awake, the more "pressure" there is to sleep. This means going to bed later - for me it's now between 12:00am and 12:30am. It's hard to get your mind around the fact that going to bed earlier has no direct correlation to how well or how much you sleep - only that you'll have more time staring at the ceiling.
This whole experiment in sleep has cost me about $200 (including the light box), so really, if it works, it will have the best ROI I could have imagined. The things that really helped me out were a program called SleepTracks and a book from the library called "Say Good Night to Insomnia" by Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs and Harvard University. They were both invaluable.

PS: I think I've got an explanation to why I got this "sudden bout" of insomnia: Three months in the hospital with little or no physical exercise, low - indoor light all the time, and wintertime in Vancouver.