A dog and a dream

First the crappy part of my day...trying to take a nap in a secluded section of the library with my head on the table when I started having a terrible dream/very real hallucination that someone had come up behind me and was trying to hurt me. When I tried to wake myself up from it, I was semi-paralyzed (as can happen with some narcoleptics when falling asleep or waking up) and it took me 10 or 15 seconds to shake out of it. This has happened before, but I'm usually home in bed. Even then, it's still very scary to hallucinate in the middle of the night that someone is in your bedroom and you are not able to kick, run, or scream because your body is not responding to the commands you are giving. I can't help but think about "what ifs"...what if there WAS someone there and I couldn't move to get away? what if there was a fire? what if someday my children need me and I can't get out of bed to reach them?

I don't let these ideas invade my thoughts too often because if I did I could "what if" myself to death about all sorts of things. That's why I blog them, so I can get them out and (hopefully) let them go. The best I can do is be as prepared as possible, keep myself and my family as safe as possible, and share my thoughts with the internets.

On a cool note, I saw a woman on campus today walking with her dog that was wearing his little (Pomeranian-sized) service vest. I have wanted to train our dog to be a service dog for me since we got him 6 months ago, so I struck up a conversation with her about her dog and its training. She was happy to tell me all about how she trained him herself, a couple resources to check out, and answered my questions about taking him to various places. I knew that service dogs are allowed anywhere except for a few select places (surgery, for example, and a couple other necessarily sterile environments). I also knew it was ok to train your own dog, but I was very excited to hear from someone that had successfully done it, as both having them trained by someone else and buying a pre-trained service dog are considerably expensive. This meeting has rekindled my motivation to explore the possibility of training our dog to be a service dog. Who knows, maybe one day when I'm about to doze off unexpectedly, a swift lick in the face will help to snap me out of it.

Narco thoughts for the day...

Lately, I have found that 200mg of Provigil (Pro-V going forward) once a day is just not cutting it most days. I am prescribed enough to take it "1-2 times daily", so this isn't a huge problem, it just bothers me that I need it. I realize that with a stimulant it's possible to need to a higher dose over time in order to achieve the same efficacy, it's just another frustrating reminder that, barring discovery of a cure, I will be on this medication for the rest of my life. My family member who also has Narcolepsy has taken 400mg all along and I have read of people taking even high doses, so I guess I felt some sort of comfort that I had a less severe case. Any case of Narcolepsy is debilitating, but I know it could be much worse.

"I need my Pro-V" (sung to the tune of "I want my MTV" by Sting at the end of Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing")