This post jumps back into the series on sleep problems. I want to share a personal experience with the prescription medication Ambien.

My 96 year old mother began to have serious sleeping problems about two years ago. In fact, it was so serious that she got her days and nights turned around. She was awake all night and slept during the day. Normally, I wouldn’t consider that to be such a great problem, but the daytime sleep was very sporadic and at times she would fall to sleep while eating at the table. If not for the fast reaction of other people, there are times when she literally would have ended up with her face in the plate of food in front of her.

Her doctor prescribed Ambien in a fairly mild dose. Now, granted, she started sleeping at night, but had terrible nightmares… I mean the being chased by someone with a bloody axe kind. And the crazy thing was that she started halicinating during the day. She was deaf, but could hear music playing from an imaginary radio. She saw children playing in her living room. She saw the floor full of snakes. She literally thought that the things she saw were real, and when I told her there really weren’t any snakes or children she thought she was going crazy.

I stopped her from taking the Ambien and right away that halucinations went away. It was far too great a price to pay for sleeping at night. I’ll talk about some other solutions that worked in future posts.

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