Ironically, between writing the following and typing the command to post it, I fell asleep. Which was a good thing. That was at about 3:45 this morning. Beyond this paragraph, I'm going to let it stand as I wrote it this morning...
Huh. When the sun came up and I hadn't slept (because I'd fallen asleep the previous afternoon and woken in early evening), I should've given up on sleep and taken the codeine after all, 'cause even without the codeine+caffeine, here it is a couple hours shy of the next sunrise and I still haven't slept. (If I had to spend a long stretch awake, why couldn't it have included when I needed to be driving to rehearsal?) If I'd known I wouldn't sleep regardless, I would've gone for the etra pain relief. Feh.
(I did manage, with extra tramadol and naproxen, to get to the point that walking around the house wasn't excruciating to my knees and back, but my arms & shoulders hurt enough to make other things difficult all day. It was some improvement, but not enough so to satisfy me.)
That's just how things happened to work out today. But I will indulge in one bit of out-and--out whining: I'm really fed up with the whole "Princess and the Pea" thing my skin has done about five nights out of eight lately, where a flake of my own damned skin on the sheet feels like a cracker crumb, a poppy seed (not sure how that got there) feels like a thorn, and an actual cracker crumb (I do know how that got there) feels like a medium sized chunk of gravel. I think (hope, at least) that if I can get other fibromyalgia symptoms back under a semblance of control, this (which I'm assuming is fibro-related) will go away. In the meantime, it sure doesn't help with the sleep problems.
So far the most effective thing I've found for helping me get to sleep -- and it tips the odds a bit but isn't reliable -- is to jack my blood suger up a fair bit above where it ought to be.[1] I'm thinkin' that any one instance of that probably doesn't hurt me too badly, but I'm pretty sure the damage is cumulative, so it shares one[2] of the problems of using alcohol to help me sleep: I can't afford the long term effects of using it regularly (or even irregularly at any pace higher than "once every two or three blue moons"). I need a way of pushing my body toward sleep that doesn't involve a gradual poison.
If I'm feeling well enough to stand for a while and coordinated enough to chop and stir things without dropping them all over the kitchen floor, preparing a high-fat, high-tryptophan meal that also has enough carbs to push my blood glucose up, does add extra kick to the sleep-allowing effect. But a) I'm never going to slim down enough for a coupe of cute skirts I want to wear again if I keep doing that before bed, and b) it doesn't seeem to work again the next two nights after a successful tryptophan-bomb. Oy, my confounding metabalism!
Well, time to close my eyes and try counted-breath meditation again, in case trying to fall asleep finally works this time. Ah, for younger days, when staying awake too long at a stretch was because interesting stuff was happening all around me at a con and I didn't want to miss any of it, instead of just because my body won't sleep yet.
[1] I know some of my friends will hate me for calling 180-200 mg/dL disturbingiy high when they routinely see readings higher than that, but considering that the ADA says to try to keep it under 180 and a somewhat convincing and voluminous web site suggests that 140 is actually the level at which damage starts accumulating, since I usually can keep my sugar below about 140 if I pay attention, then it makes sense to consider pushing it to 200 to get to sleep a questionable-at-best trade-off and probably a just plain bad idea.
[2] Fortunately it doesn't share the "if I drink enough to put me to sleep I'll wake up still drunk", risk of addiction, and "I don't particularly like feeling drunk" problems of alcohol. Okay, the waking up still drunk part was based on the results of a single trial, but given the quantity of alcohol that experiment required a similar outcome next time seems likely, and waking up drunk was unpleasant enough that the idea of repeating the experiment to be sure really doesn't appeal to me.