Humidity Legs

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It is 4:47 a.m, and I am running on approximately 2 and a half hours of sleep. Humidity legs woke me up. "Humidity legs" is what I have taken to calling the nightly bouts of muscle discomfort that hit me around this time of year every year, when the thermometer is maxed out and the air is like wet cotton clogging up your lungs. Maybe it's not very creative, but it is what it is. It works.


Humidity legs doesn't cause what I would describe as traditional pain: it's not sharp, or stabbing, or throbbing or any of those nice, descriptive adjectives generally used to describe pain. The closest I can come to describing it is as a dull, persistent ache in the quadriceps and hamstrings that almost feels like pressure building up in the muscle, giving you an urge to stretch that feels ok while you're doing it, but which ceases to alleviate the problem as soon as you stop.

To deal with humidity legs, I take something called Flexeril. Quite honestly I could use a muscle relaxant of a higher caliber, but it would screw with my stomach too much. I know; I've tried.
Last time I took anything stronger, I was sick as a dog for a week. I have discovered, though, that when I take a Flexeril and one of my Ativan at the same time, I get better relief than with just the Flexeril alone. Apparently Ativan, being a drug commonly used to treat panic attacks, contains a mild relaxant of its own.

Sometimes I have better luck with this than other times. I took the stuff half an hour ago now and it hasn't kicked in yet. Sometimes it doesn't, when the humidity is truly phenomenal. which forces me to have to make a decision: do I take another dose of Flexeril and risk getting sick or do I stay up and wait it out and maybe function all day on 2 hours of sleep? Neither choice looks very appealing to me, but today I'm doing the wait-it-out method. Hopefully I can cram in a few more hours at some point before I leave for work this afternoon.

Tick, tock,

Tif