Illness and Insomnia: How One Patient Fights Cancer and Sleep Issues

Chemotherapy actually improved Graham's insomnia: "It totally wiped me out; for once I had trouble staying awake instead of trouble sleeping." For some cancer patients, however, it can have the opposite effect.

Once Graham's chemo was completed, his insomnia came back, though not as bad as it once was. "It's different now," he says; "I used to have no problem falling asleep, but I'd just wake up around 2 or 3 and couldn't get back to sleep. Now, I have a lot of trouble falling asleep, even with sleeping pills."

When he's too anxious to sleep, Graham takes a low dose of Xanax, which seems to relax him enough to doze off. He also compromised with his doctor, taking trazodone most nights but keeping a 15-day prescription of Ambien on hand for nights before early morning work meetings.

Graham's general practitioner is the doctor who treats his insomnia, but every time he starts on a new drug, he informs his oncologist.

"The key is to have open lines of communication between doctors," says James Wyatt, PhD, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "Insomnia is still treated separately, but it's important to look at it as part of the big picture."