Wednesday

Mike had me sitting in his car outside the mall. We’d finished the burgers and now he’s apologising to me. Says the physician down at the hospital has been against this from the out. If I’m to get the best out of Ambien, I’ve to be in on the act. I’m the one who has to make the changes to my life. No-one else can do it for me. The idea of me being like an innocent observer is unethical. It’s all very well for me to write about Ambien but having me trying to guess what it’s supposed to do means I’ve not given informed consent to the treatment. Having Dave give consent for me was always on the borderline because I’ve never been declared incompetent.

I ask whether this Ambien is as good as he thinks it is. For once, I hope he’s going to be honest with me.

He says I’m a kind of experiment. In all the trials that the drug companies do, they get willing volunteers who all know what the drug they’re testing is supposed to do. This means it’s difficult to tell what they really feel. A lot of the time, they imagine things happening to them. They wanted to give Ambien to me and see what happened.

I wondered who “they” were but didn’t ask. I wondered whether what I’d written about their Ambien was helpful.

He laughed and said it was like gold. Not only had I fallen asleep like I was supposed to, but there’d been no side effects. When some people take Ambien they wake up still feeling drowsy. That means they haven’t slept through. The Ambien is still active in their systems when they wake up. I was much more alert than usual. He said something about sleep latency that I didn’t understand, but it didn’t sound as if it had affected me. And there was an improvement in my memory. Ambien can affect some people’s memories of what was happening just after they take it. My general mental state since starting to take Ambien seemed better including my memory.

He said clinical studies were all very well but bending the rules every now and again got really useful results. He thanked me and told me he was going to keep on helping me. If I was willing, I could still be Ambien Girl and save myself.

At first I thought I should feel mad at him but like that was going to take way too much effort. So I just thought about what was happening. I wished Dave was there to help me like he’s been helping me so much over this last year. But there I was in the Taurus with Mike. For better or worse, Ambien seemed to be a way I was going to get better. It didn’t really matter how I’d got the chance. Having the chance was the important thing. So even if the way I got started was less than honest, I was still started down the right track. Whether Ambien could take me all the way or only a part, it seemed I should stay Ambien Girl for as long as I could.