u/deadblackwings

I had an appointment yesterday (my second) with a psychologist who is working with chronic pain patients through my pain clinic, to help them with insomnia. Mind you, I'm not even sure what I'm dealing with IS insomnia. I sleep just fine as long as I'm left alone to sleep from 4 AM to noon. The sleep study I had was done very poorly, and they concluded from 2 hours of data that I must just have insomnia, and told me to get CBT-I.

This doctor had me record my sleep for 2 weeks. It clearly showed that I was sleeping from roughly 3:30 AM to anywhere from 7-10 AM. My sleep efficiency was around 90%. She still insisted I needed to do sleep restriction... from 3-8 AM. Not sure what's restricting about that... then she tells me "well you can't be in bed any other time." I tried to explain to her that I can't just leap out of bed as soon as I'm awake and she tells me it's part of the process. "It's really hard in the beginning." Sure. I bet it is... for normal, neurotypical, healthy people.

I could not get through to this doctor how impossible it was for me to be able to just get out of bed. She seemed to think I was just staying there out of comfort or laziness, and not because it takes a good half hour for all of the pain to settle down (or for my husband to come put me back together if any joints got loose). She also wouldn't accept that sometimes I go to bed early because pain means I just need to exist somewhere comfortable. Not for sleep, just to be in slightly less pain. She just kept telling me "well you need to go somewhere else."

It disturbs me that someone so ableist is running a program through the pain clinic. I ended up telling her that this is not going to work, and I need a proper sleep study to figure out what's really going on. Not getting my hopes up on that one though.