Quite the Lousy Night

Usually, my health worsens while I'm awake and, more often than not, when attempting to do things.  Any activity (ie, "doing things", raises my body core temperature and that is a significant trigger for poor health) is a major trigger for me as is straying from my long list of dietary restrictions and limits.  The temperature of my environment is also a big trigger.  Being in warm environments for more than 20 minutes or so is a problem.  Anyway, my health usually worsens during my waking hours.  Sometimes, however, for whatever reason (this is the unexplained, idiopathic part of this rare illness), poor health and sometimes even dangerously poor health is triggered while I am sleeping and the middle of the night last night was one of those nights. 

Since the bedroom was only about 62° through the night, I know that a warm environment was not my trigger this time.  In this case, it seems it was simply an idiopathic triggering of poor health.

I was having this dream that I was having great difficulty breathing.  Eventually, I awoke and realized that I was actually having great difficulty breathing in real life.  I laid in bed trying to get a decent breath of air but nothing was registering...  air just went in and out of my lungs and I continued to feel as though I was underwater or that the air was devoid of oxygen.  It is a feeling sort of like when you get the wind knocked out of you while playing a contact sport.  Air goes in and out but you never get a productive intake of oxygen.

I don't like to instantly jump right out of bed because sometimes I can actually fill my lungs enough to get some oxygen and jumping into a sort of panic mode means I'll never get back to sleep.  In this case, I was only feeling a partially productive breath once every ten or so attempts.  That is okay to just survive but I had to get up and grab my inhaler which, at the time, was located only a few feet away in the living room right outside our bedroom.  Jumping up right away oftentimes will ruin any chances of sleep for the remainder of the night because it wakes me up too much so I was trying to avoid that.  This time, however, my breathing was not improving so I had to get up.  

During these periods, I'm also paying attention to other telltale signs of anaphylaxis especially since breathing difficulties often goes hand-in-hand with other anaphylactic symptoms.  If I have two symptoms, I must administer epinephrine to counter the cascade of symptoms leading to anaphylaxis.  Fortunately, this night, I was only experiencing great difficulty breathing.  

Even though this was a relatively insignificant "episode" of mast cell disease symptoms, it still ruined my night of sleep.  I was up and out of bed four times last night.  Trying to sleep through this stuff, no matter how exhausted you are, is close to impossible.  Needless to say, I'm exhausted today.  My breathing could be a bit better too.  Maybe I should use my inhaler again and pump some more extra medications with my lunchtime medications...