Sleepless in SLC

I want to kill my doctor.  I want to buy a gun, get in my car, take the elevator up to the second floor, huff and puff past the receptionist, past the nurse, into an examination room where he'll be looking at the computer rather than the patient, see his surprised face and shoot him in the chest.  "Bam, you're dead.  All the good that exercise and eating green vegetables did you, you smug S.O.B."


Whoa, Louise.  Just last week you were thinking how you could never kill anyone.  How you've never been angry enough.  How you're too good for that.  How good you are, Louise.


How delusional.

A few nights without Ambien and I'm a raging homicidal maniac.  The last time I went in to see Dr. Misogyny, he told me how he had gotten off Ambien and he thought I should too.

A couple of years ago he said I could take Ambien "for the rest of your life."

Liar, pants on fire.

Then there's this:

A new study has linked popular sleeping pills such as Ambien and Restoril with a nearly five-fold increased risk of early death.

Researchers at Scripps Health, a nonprofit health system in San Diego, estimate that in 2010, sleeping pill use may have contributed to up to 500,000 "excess deaths" in the United States. Heavy users aren't the only ones at risk—even people who took fewer than two pills monthly are three times more likely to die than non-users, researchers say.

"We were pretty startled by the findings," says Robert Langer, one of the authors of the study, which was published in BMJ, a British medical journal owned by the British Medical Association. "Since we started trying to qualify the results of this analysis about a year ago, I'll tell you, my prescription bottle for Ambien has sat on the shelf unopened."

The study followed 10,000 sleeping pill users and 23,500 non-users in Pennsylvania between 2002 and 2006. About 1 percent of non-users died during that time, compared to 6 percent of sleeping pill users. Since the medical records available for the study didn't include the cause of death, it's unclear how sleeping pill use contributed to the higher death rate.

Maybe people slug them down with a little brandy?

Combine them with Ativan?
Combine them with painkillers?

Plug their noses with them?

Sleep-walk off the balcony?

Or perhaps, the prescription lapsed and covering one's head with a plastic bag was the only alternative.

I know I'm finding the plastic bag an attractive substitute for Ambien.

There are worse things than dying in your sleep.  There's not sleeping at all.