Three nights of sweating

In the last week, I have woken up drenched in sweat three times. The night sweats began last year - sometime around the end of November or start of December. At first I would only have them occasionally, once every week or so. Over the course of the semester they gradually became more frequent. Sometimes I now get them several nights in a row, other times it is an isolated incident. In the last week, including last night, it happened three times.

Waking up soaking wet is disorienting - you do not expect to wake up that way. It is not normal. You are lying in a cozy, dry bed under a roof. Experience tells you that you should be comfy, warm, and dry. When it happens, I wake up confused, cold, and panicked, a sense of where am and that something is wrong or dangerous. A few times I have started frantically looking for the ocean, thinking that I must have been drowning. It takes a few minutes to realize what is going on as I feel my back, skin almost slimy with sweat and pajamas soaked through. Then comes the scramble in the dark, half asleep, half panicked, to search for a towel and dry clothing. Usually I wake up before the bedsheets are  too wet, so I don't always have change those right away. It helps to be able to wait until morning to do that. Never the less, but the time I have stripped off the wet clothing and found dry pajamas, I am fully awake. It takes me a long time to fall back asleep. While I generally like sleeping (as most nursing students do!), I have started becoming afraid of the night sweats.

I have tried several things to prevent night sweats - keeping my bedroom door and window open, using less and thinner blankets, sleeping in only a thin night shirt or my underwear, chucking all extra pillows out of the bed, but nothing seems to help.

The combination of always being cold/having chills and night sweats while I sleep is really starting to bother me. I will be freeing cold when I go to bed, to the point of shivering, but will avoid using extra blankets so I don't overheat, yet I still wake up soaking wet. It is confusing - my body temperature is regularly at about 36.5 (lucky if I occasionally get to 36.8 or 36.9) - I am always cold but sweat so much at night...

Night sweats are one of the possible signs/symptoms of chronic osteomyelitis.
I will be bringing it up with my infectious disease specialist tomorrow morning when I go in for a check up and to get CT scan results.