L-D-N-tertaining (aka LDN post 2)…

I don’t watch much t.v. these days. We don’t have cable and I prefer books and music anyway, and since I started my new job in September, I work most weeknights. Fortunately, around that same time I started low dose naltrexone (LDN), which replaced the entertainment drama missing from my life.

LDN doesn’t have an extensive list of side effects, but vivid dreams is at the top of the list. Generally, I don’t mind a little sleepytime entertainment. I don’t even m

ind when they get vivid, if the graphic details are of adult situations and hold at least a PG-13 rating. What I don’t love is when the vivid dreams are like a really bad trip on LSD of questionable origins.

They weren’t exactly nightmares. No one was trying to kill me, I wasn’t running from some incredulous beast, and I wasn’t late for 1st period at my Catholic high school because I couldn’t remember what class I had first that day (an actual recurring dream I have regularly). But some were disturbing.

In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson said about drug-induced hallucinations: “…after awhile you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth.” LDN dreams were like that, except instead of a dead grandmother it was my dead mother, and instead of a knife in her teeth it was endless question of how I could let her die. She was always still sick in the dreams – I have yet to have any dreams of when she was healthy but I know with time those will come – but had varying levels of sickness. Sometimes she would tell me she wished she was still alive and we’d talk about her death, and other times we’d just chill and I’d help her with daily tasks, like I did when she was alive and suffering. The content of the dream wasn’t always troubling, but the level of detail was. I would often wake up in the middle of the night after a dream and not want to go back to sleep, not necessarily because the dream was particularly troubling, but because the dream was so graphic I couldn’t remember if she was alive or dead. I’d have to relive her death each time I remembered the truth.

Not all dreams were about her. In fact, many were not. Some were sexy. A few were just recounting events that occurred in the past. The majority were probably about work, just continuing whatever projects I had worked on that day, but in frustratingly accurate detail. But even those were unwanted. I work 10-12 hours per day; sleep is my chance to escape from that shit. I would wake several times per night because of the dreams. Sleep stopped feeling restful, so I stopped taking LDN.

I only ever got up to 0.4mg of LDN. When I stopped, I imagined I’d try it again after a few months. After all, the dreams only became nightly as I increased the dose. I initially had the vivid dreams at 0.1-0.2mg, but they quickly went away. However, after reaching 0.4mg and reducing the dose back down to 0.1mg, the vivid dreams remained. In fact, for about 3 months after completely stopping, I still had very vivid dreams.

The LDN did noticeably improve my nerve and joint pain, and that seemed like reason enough to give it another try, albeit at a lower and slower dose. However, in January, I accidentally discovered that my B12 levels are quite low. As I have mentioned before, I order my own iron tests and check my iron and ferritin at regular intervals (every other month). I learned early on that I can pay a $45 copay to visit a doctor, beg them to check my iron because their scale of “normal” levels of 10-180 is absolutely not reasonable for an adult woman, and pay another $40 for the blood test. Or, I can ay $39 (plus tax and fees) to a private lab, go to Quest and have the tests run. Really, it’s a no brainer.

Anyway, my lab was having a deal on B12 tests and I thought, why not, and added one of those to my cart as well. Turns out my B12 levels are low. They’re not dangerously low, they’re on the low side of normal, but the lowest I have ever seen. I don’t generally have a problem with B12, despite having a MTHFR mutation. I know all about methylcobalamin, and have taken it on and off in the past. My B12 is almost always right in the middle of the normal range (even when not taking B12), so this came as a bit of a shock. I have no idea what caused the sudden drop.

Low B12 can cause nerve pain-like symptoms, so it’s possible the increase in nerve pain I have experienced over the past few years could have been caused by that. I last had B12 checked in June 2022, when it was 1,045. Now, it’s 200. So, a significant drop for less than 2 years.

I have been taking methylcobalamin since by results in January. No noticeable improvement in nerve pain yet, but I have another blood draw schedule for this week, so we’ll see where my numbers are at. Until I get the B12 thing figured out, I’ll probably hold off on trying LDN again for a little while.

It’s possible there was another cause for the vivid dreams that I haven’t located yet. For example, I get very vivid dreams for a day or two when I consume anything with aspartame. That shit messes with me. But fortunately, the vivid dreams are much less frequent, and are back to providing an appropriate level of sexy entertainment, thankfully, without my dead mom.

Smell ya later.
linds