Wated days, wasted nights

Today's cheese report is brought to you by Lancashire. (Crumbly... but creamy.)

I have not slept in three days now.

The worst part of this is that I'm not getting any work done. I mean, it would be one thing if I wasn't sleeping but was able to use the time productively, to work on my papers and my thesis. But as it is I can barely string a sentence together. Yesterday I spent 1/2 hour reading one page of a book, only to realize that I hadn't taken in a single word of it.

So the last three days of my life have been completely wasted. And it's not like I'm gaining any more of them, either. I'm 44 and I'm on the downhill slide. My days are getting fewer, not more plentiful. It's not like I have any more to waste. But that's exactly what's happening.

I'm getting locked into a vicious cycle. I don't sleep, so the only way to even manage a catnap is to stay awake until I literally pass out from sheer exhaustion, which usually happens around 6:00 AM. By then it's relatively quiet in the halls, so I can actually sleep for a bit, at least until the kidiots start slamming doors and yelling again. But then I'm tired and listless all day, and I have no energy, so I lie down a lot and take catnaps, and do sweet fuck all else. And then I don't sleep at night because I've been catnapping throughout the day.

I was so desperate I took a small handful of pills this morning to knock me out (and to kill the headache that's been pounding in my head for the last few days as a result of the sleeplessness).

I'm seriously thinking about quitting and coming home.

UPDATE: Scratch that last comment. I'm not seriously thinking about ANYTHING. Nor even thinking, period. How can I, under these circumstances? Even the autopilot has switched itself off.