Diary of a Brain Tumor -- Mommy & Mary Jane

No, I did not make a new friend.  Not in the least.

Let me preface this by saying that while I was growing up, I was generally a good girl.  I rebelled, like any kid would, but I never did drugs.  Never, ever, ever.  I may have tried a cigarette or two or snuck a few alcoholic drinks (Daddy - if you're reading this, it's too late to ground me!), but never did I do drugs.

The closest I ever came to getting high was inhaling the secondhand smoke from the menthols my mother and her friends chain-smoked in the bar of the Duquesne Croatian Club.

But I digress......

When all of this brain cancer stuff happened with Nani, I was on hyper-alert.  I wasn't sleeping well, at all.  Nothing I tried worked.  So, a dear friend of mine, one day brings me over a bottle of Stratos Sleep.  She tells me to go ahead and take one at bedtime and I should sleep like a baby. 

Now you see that it CLEARLY says SLEEP on the bottle, right?

Ok, I'm game.  I've tried everything else -- and hey, I DO live in Colorado where there's a pot shop on every corner....right next to the liquor store and burrito trucks.

So, on a night when I knew My Marine was going to be home, I pop one of these babies and wait for peaceful, blissful, relaxing sleep to come.

What I got was nothing even close to peaceful, blissful, relaxing sleep.


1 am: 
I am startled awake by Technicolor dreams starring images that were clearly created by Picasso.  These images keep swirling in my brain, even as I sit up, wide awake in bed, thinking what the HELL was THAT?  Every time I try to close my eyes, I see flashes of rainbow lights behind my eyelids and seriously begin to think that I'm stroking out.

2:30am
My legs start twitching like an Irish dancer in Riverdance.  Nothing I do seems to stop the independent flailing of my limbs.  So I decide to get up. 

2:45am
My Marine sits up and sees me pacing a rut in front of our bed.  He looks at me and asks, "What the fuck is WRONG with you??!!"  I look at him and practically snarl, "I'm going to KILL her.....I'm going to kill "insert friend's name".  Peaceful, relaxing sleep, my ass!  I'm going to kill her!!!"  I tell him that I'm pacing the floor because it's too fucking dark to take the dog for a walk, and at the moment, she's hiding from me in the closet because I'm scaring her to death.

3:15am
After doing about a marathon's worth of pacing in my bedroom, I calm down enough to crawl into bed and try to get back to sleep.

Somewhere between 3:15-4:00am
My legs have finished their encore performance, the giant, Picasso-like images in my brain have gone back to whatever circle of hell drug-induced Technicolor nightmares come from, and I'm finally able to go back to sleep.

6am
I wake up with a horrible cottonmouth and a hangover headache that I haven't felt since My Marine was deployed.  I don't remember drinking the night before.....or did this crap work like Ambien....where you do stuff and you don't remember.  I drag myself downstairs and don't see any evidence of an unconscious drinking binge in the kitchen or recycling bin.  So I make myself a cup of coffee and tell myself...."NEVER again!"

Two days later, I go into another recreational pot shop just to see if maybe I just got a bad batch of this stuff.  I go in and talk to the very nice couple behind the counter.  I explained what happened and she started to laugh and said......

"Oh, you're one of those....."

What does THAT mean?

Turns out that there is a percentage of users who experience the opposite effect of what this particular product was supposed to do.  Instead of relaxing you, it has you up at all hours chasing the dragon while doing Riverdance in your bedroom.

And I'm one of those lucky percentages. 

She tried to sell me an edible chocolate bar which she said would work much better for me.

I told her no thanks.....I think I'll just stick with my wine..........