When my husband died, I was so depressed that at times I didn’t know where I was. Apart from my kids, my husband was the person that I loved the most, not because he was my husband, but because he was my best friend. We had been together since high school and although there were rough times when we thought we would go separate ways, we somehow managed to survive those periods and end up even happier.
Since we had been married for years before we had kids, when my husband died, my kids were too small to understand what exactly was happening. Every day they would ask me about him and each time I didn’t know what to tell them. And this made me feel even worse. I used to cry at nights thinking about the past. However, it wasn’t long until I had to face the harsh reality and move on with my life.
Before it all happened, I was a housewife and I didn’t have to work. But now that I was a single parent, I had to find a job. Luckily I had a degree in nursing which enabled me to find a job very quickly. The only problem was that I sometimes had to work at night and this turned out to be more that I could handle. Taking care of your kids single-handedly is hard enough even if you don’t have a job. Having a job makes everything more complicated, let alone having a job where you have to change shifts.
There were days when I didn’t sleep at all because when I got back from the night shift, I had to take care of the kids and I really couldn’t afford hiring a full time nanny to help me out. My parents lived far away and there was basically no one that I could turn to for help. All of my friends had their own kids and their own problems.
Soon after all that, I started having difficulties falling asleep. At first, I thought that I was just a bit anxious because of the situation I ended up in and I thought that my condition would eventually get better. Unfortunately, this went on for quite a while and it wasn’t long until I ended up not sleeping for days. As a result, I was easily irritable and I can’t even think about how this affected my kids. I guess that I wasn’t exactly the best parent that my kids needed.
When I turned to my doctor, he said that I was definitely suffering from insomnia and given that I was a single parent with small kids at home, I had to do something about it. He prescribed Ambien and even though I was a nurse, I never really liked taking drugs. I knew that they were necessary in some cases, but I really believed that my condition was not so serious even though I felt awful and miserable.
However, as I trusted my doctor (after all, he was a family friend), I started taking Ambien and I was surprised by how efficient the drug was. Falling asleep was not a nightmare anymore and I was finally able to get some rest that I desperately needed.
I also found out that when you get some sleep and some rest, all the problems that you might have seem smaller because you can think about them more clearly and rationally. Ambien turned out to be just the thing that I needed because it brought me back to life. Now, I’m sure that I’m doing my best when it comes to taking care of both myself and my kids.