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In my late 20s I began to have pain in my legs as if I'd run a marathon every day. It got so bad that I couldn't walk across our local mall without having to sit down and rest. I went to a range of doctors but nobody had any answers. One neurologist thought it must be psychosomatic but agreed to do a muscle biopsy in my left thigh, probably hoping to prove it was psychosomatic. He was shocked to discover that my muscle showed signs of damage at the cellular level, probably from overuse, but he didn't know why or what to do about it.A few years later I woke up one morning feeling rested and realized that my legs didn't hurt. SLEEP! That was the problem. I quickly looked in the yellow pages (yes, this was many years ago) and there were two doctors listed under the sleep category. I called one and immediately made an appointment. This doctor suggested a sleep study and I quickly agreed. The sleep study was simply getting wired up to a bunch of monitors overnight at his sleep lab, which was in the basement of the hospital. The following morning he asked me how I'd slept and I said it was the best night's sleep I'd had in months since it was a totally dark and quiet room. He then showed me a sample of a normal sleep pattern with its normal range of activity. Then he showed me my monitoring pattern. They didn't look anything alike. Mine looked like it was from someone running a race, which in fact, I had been. The doctor said I clearly had a bad case of Restless Legs Syndrome. I finally had a name for my sleep problem!The good news was that there were drugs to help quiet my muscles while I slept and they were effective. The bad news is that none of them lasted forever. Most were effective for about 8 years before I had to change to another class of drugs. Today I anxiously await some new wonder drug so I can return to sleeping well at night.
