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Magenta

Senior Member
Jul 3, 2015
55,857
26,019
113
I have the pleasure ==finally== of sleeping through the night!

And for some reason I have gone from many many years of getting only about five hours of sleep a night to seemingly suddenly needing eight hours of sleep a night! I have been having a bit of a hard time adjusting to this, since going to bed early has never been my preference really except yeah sometimes on Friday night of all nights haha.

I also just stopped all meds for my shingles. There was some concern over prolonged neuralgia due to so many doctors completely dropping the ball when they failed to properly diagnose me in time, despite the fact that shingles is a very common, very well known condition... since nerve pain damage can linger longer if the condition is not caught and treatment started soon enough, and I was going to doctors for about three weeks before they finally said oh yeah that is what it is and by then I had extensive nerve damage and quite a lot of shingles :p Besides the marks on my body still being there, the nerve damage seems to be mostly cleared up except for a bit of sensitivity that surely does not need drugs to deal with :D

 

Blain

The Word Weaver
Aug 28, 2012
19,212
2,547
113
I have the pleasure ==finally== of sleeping through the night!

And for some reason I have gone from many many years of getting only about five hours of sleep a night to seemingly suddenly needing eight hours of sleep a night! I have been having a bit of a hard time adjusting to this, since going to bed early has never been my preference really except yeah sometimes on Friday night of all nights haha.

I also just stopped all meds for my shingles. There was some concern over prolonged neuralgia due to so many doctors completely dropping the ball when they failed to properly diagnose me in time, despite the fact that shingles is a very common, very well known condition... since nerve pain damage can linger longer if the condition is not caught and treatment started soon enough, and I was going to doctors for about three weeks before they finally said oh yeah that is what it is and by then I had extensive nerve damage and quite a lot of shingles :p Besides the marks on my body still being there, the nerve damage seems to be mostly cleared up except for a bit of sensitivity that surely does not need drugs to deal with :D

Oh wow I had no idea you had that many health problems but I do know your pain about having only a few hours of sleep. For three years now I have been unable to sleep properly no medication helps they only make it worse or don't work however I found the cause I just don't like it. My body seems to like being nocturnal as I can lay in bed from 9 pm all the way till 2 or three am and then only fall asleep around that time and then I sleep great in the day but I wake up around 1- 4 pm in the day.

I like waking up early being rested and then going to bed at a decent time at night but the more I try this the less sleep I get my body just doesn't let me fall asleep until late at night. When i had cancer I was prescribed weed and while I don't really like how it makes me feel it was soooo easy to get some good sleep but it's Illegal here in okc to begin with and plus I hear trump is going to make it stay that way
 

Magenta

Senior Member
Jul 3, 2015
55,857
26,019
113
Oh wow I had no idea you had that many health problems but I do know your pain about having only a few hours of sleep. For three years now I have been unable to sleep properly no medication helps they only make it worse or don't work however I found the cause I just don't like it. My body seems to like being nocturnal as I can lay in bed from 9 pm all the way till 2 or three am and then only fall asleep around that time and then I sleep great in the day but I wake up around 1- 4 pm in the day.

I like waking up early being rested and then going to bed at a decent time at night but the more I try this the less sleep I get my body just doesn't let me fall asleep until late at night. When i had cancer I was prescribed weed and while I don't really like how it makes me feel it was soooo easy to get some good sleep but it's Illegal here in okc to begin with and plus I hear trump is going to make it stay that way
I know what it is like to lie in bed and not be able to sleep. I hate it :mad: Have you ever tried any herbal teas? With chamomile, skullcap, hops, valerian, passionflower etc? They don't always help but if you are willing to try them they may help you relax a bit more. Is your mind really active while you are lying there? Do you ever try listening to music or somebody talking, like a recording of anything, or something like a radio program? I find that following the trail of something besides my own rehashed thoughts can really help lead me down a path to the altered brain wave state necessary for sleep. Sometimes just listening to myself breathe in and out helps. Pay attention to something and see if you can feel yourself drifting off. I love that feeling of slipping into that altered state of unconsciousness :D

Getting a good night's sleep is so important, so I am really glad to be getting better sleep :) One of my co-workers suggested pot a while ago to help me sleep, but I am not interested after having smoked the stuff "recreationally" for so many years it amounts to decades! Even if it was just the THC or whatever, cookies? Haha. I would not want to risk getting addicted to it all over again, again :p It is treated mostly as if it is legal here even though it is not really. There are medical pot dispensaries all over the place, so all you need is a sympathetic doctor and a prescription. Sometimes when I think of the price of things, like chocolate, my goodness, five dollars for a hundred grams of organic dark chocolate! I remind myself that I used to spend forty dollars for three point five four (3.54) grams of marijuana (that is an eighth of an ounce and would last me a week) :p

I also have COPD now thanks to stupidly starting to smoke after having quit for seven years... I first quit when I originally got clean and sober in 1994, and that was a direct result of crying out to God for help... amazingly enough I did not think I needed help with mind and mood altering substances, because the fact of the matter is that I liked them just fine despite all the problems they may have caused me over twenty four years, and all the near death experiences I had because of them. I realize that sounds rather dire, but truly most of the hospitalizations and near fatal stuff was primarily in my very early twenties; after that it was a couple of decades of typically just pot pot and more pot, pass me another beer please, and do you have any requests for what you would like to hear me play on my guitar? :D Somewhere in there I muddled my way through a failed marriage, multiple miscarriages including a stillbirth about ten days before the "I do"s, and the very premature birth of my daughter (who is 30.5 years old today :D)

However, seven years after being delivered of my substance addictions (pot, alcohol, and cigarettes), I was in quite a bit of emotional pain due to relationship issues, and made the bad decision to smoke a cigarette, and then a couple more cigarettes, and pretty soon I was back to a pack a day. Within a year of that I was in full blown relapse.

It was within a year of that I had my conversion experience. I was working full time (which I have done pretty much my entire adult life), while studying and practicing
other things more seriously on the side, some very pagan rather occult things that I had looked into and practiced for years, and that is when God clearly spoke to me, telling me, "Put this down" and totally freaking me out, because even though I had had God experiences previously, and very cherished ones at that, I did not accept the idea of the Biblical God, and so rejected religion and Christianity and all related things. Having God speak to me, and then having Jesus Christ appear to me, was not at all what I could have expected, and yet try as I might to find some alternate explanation, there was an authenticity to the experiences I'd had that I could no longer deny, and despite looking many places for answers to some of the things I experienced, only Scripture answered sufficiently, and so I eventually finally surrendered my life to Him. I was so stubbornly set against Him, it took me almost a year after that experience :cool:

I had been seeking for many years but was really looking for another God, you know. I did not initially want the One that is, attempting to define God in ways that were acceptable to me instead of defining myself in ways that were acceptable to Him. I totally get how the natural man does not accept the things of God. I had always believed there was some spiritual explanation behind everything because I had had quite a few spiritual experiences over the course of my life, from the time I was a child, but "God" was just a term used for convenience.

Becoming a believer was the biggest change of my life! And I am two and a half years away from my last cigarette again but suffer the ill effects of having smoked for so many years, about thirty seven all told. When I get a cold or the flu it can really put me out of commission because of the condition of my lungs.

So when I was going to the doctor nearing the end of October, trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with me, and I had to enumerate for the first doctor I saw at this one clinic, a young guy like half my age and not bad looking, adding up everything medical I have been through in life etc ad nauseum, wow, I felt like such a wreck haha, yikes it is terrible when you have to make a big list like that and try to remember it all at once on the spot unprepared!

Anyways he said Nope! It is not shingles
(meanwhile my daughter had correctly diagnosed me on the phone), and I saw another two doctors within the next couple of weeks and both failed to properly diagnose me! One saw the first shingle and was informed of how numb I was in the area where the shingles came (the numbness is the attending nerve damage that is the cause of the sores that show up), and she dismissed both clear symptoms of shingles and put me on a drug that can give you shingles! I swear, the level of incompetence is staggering at times :p

ANyways, I got shingles at the beginning of November, and it took a while for the sores to go away, and the nerve pain was quite bad for a bit but it has all really settled down now. I get free flu shots because of my COPD but still came down with something the last couple of weeks coming up to Christmas, and that took me out for almost three weeks. Gee but it's great to be back to normal :D Whatever that is ;):D;) And no, I do not talk much about my physical condition. Mostly while I am here, I feel much more focused on our spiritual condition :)

Thanks for listening, Blain! And,





 

blue_ladybug

Senior Member
Feb 21, 2014
70,869
9,601
113
Well, y'alls bad weather finally reached Vermont. Freezing rain and sleet, ice, 2-4 inches of snow is here and now.. :(

Hope nobody is stupid enough to do this:

FrozenTongue.gif
 

blue_ladybug

Senior Member
Feb 21, 2014
70,869
9,601
113
Grumpy cat: Good morning? No such thing!!

Me: I agree, Grumpy. Not before coffee anyway.

Grumpy cat: Before coffee, I might as well be a dog.

:p