Insomnia strikes again

Can't sleep. Again. I have been like this as long as I can remember, although my mother claims I slept fine as a baby. Tony is a big part of my sleeping trouble. About three or four months before he was diagnosed, he started needing to go out in the middle of the night (one of the most obvious symptoms of diabetes), and my sleep was way out of whack until he went on insulin.

I'm one of those people who has trouble falling asleep and staying asleep (and, of course, falling asleep again). In the mid-1980s, I tried an experiment where I used self-hypnosis tapes to get myself in a pattern where I slept only four and a half hours a night (this was based on the 90 minute sleep cycle most people have); after 3 cycles, I would wake up easily, and I was pretty alert. I did that for almost a year, and accomplished a lot, but I think it made the overall sleep problem worse, not to mention that what made me stop was that my arthritis was getting worse, too.

I eventually got back to where I was getting at least six hours most nights, when Tony developed his bladder problem in June, and that set up another problem, what with the blood sugar crashes and so on. I couldn't sleep because I was afraid he'd have a crash and I wouldn't wake up, and now that he's stabilized, more or less, HE'S not sleeping at night. Part of his problem is almost certainly his skin condition; he's not scratching as much as I expect him to, but he has trouble getting comfortable. The last round of antibiotics doesn't seem to have done much, so on Tuesday, we're back to the vet for his biopsy. I have to trim all of the mats he's developed from the "extreme" shedding this thing causes, and he's going to look like hell. In the past week, he's lost fur on his face for the first time, so he's nowhere near looking his best. His mood seems good, anyway, and since he finished the antibiotic, his appetite is better than it's been since spring.

But he keeps waking me between 2-4 AM. It takes me an hour or so to fall asleep, so it seems as if I only had a few minutes of sleep before he's bouncing against my bed, wanting to go out.
My short-term memory and general recall have been taking a beating from menopause, and the lack of sleep is compounding the problem. Just tonight, I had to stop myself from freaking out because I thought I had lost a set of essays that needed to be graded. It turns out that I returned them on Monday.

I'm taking another shot at sleep now. I really just wanted to update about the biopsy.