RSS Feed

Posts Tagged ‘insomnia’

  1. A Night in the Sleep Clinic, Epilogue

    September 20, 2013 by Diane

    Doctor Stethoscope Standing Retro

    Doctor Rex from the sleep center called with my test results. “Do you know what you have?” he asked. Either he needed my help or he was playing twenty questions.

    “Sleep apena?” I suggested.

    “Mild sleep apnea.”

    Over the measly 40% of the time that I was sleeping, there were nine times out of every hour when I stopped breathing for over ten seconds. Seven of those times I woke up. The other two times I had a drop in oxygen. This sounded like one of those complicated word problems from fourth grade math class.

    I wondered aloud, “Could it be that I hang out on my exhale because I’m so relaxed, and that’s what you’re picking up on?”

    He rattled off some explanation about obstructed breathing and ended with, “I don’t doubt our study!”  I imagined him puffing his neck out like one of those exotic birds defending their territory.

    “What are my options?” I asked.

    “I’m leaning toward a mouthpiece, “ he said. “They’re easier to tolerate, but they don’t always work.”

    They don’t always work.  I could see why he’d lean that way.

    “Okay, so what’s involved with getting a mouthpiece?”

    Here’s what’s involved: I check myself back  into the sleep clinic and get eighteen wires hooked to my body and scalp, two prongs shoved up my nose, two belts cinched around my chest and abdomen, and a white plastic gizmo clamped to my index finger. And then…and then…they make a mold of my teeth, some kind of device hooked to a motorized machine that moves my jaw into ideal positions while I sleep.

    “Hold on. You expect me to sleep while I’m hooked up to eighteen wires, two belts, a gizmo on my finger and a machine that motors my jaw forward?”

    “Yes.”

    “Book the appointment,”  I said.

     

     

    Category Fer Cryin' Out Loud | Tags: ,,,,,, | No Comments

  2. A Night in the Sleep Clinic, Part 3

    September 17, 2013 by Diane

    http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-image-robotic-female-connected-to-wires-abstract-internet-background-image31297156

    I gave up attempting to sleep, and swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. Johnny appeared in the room in a flash, still wearing the white lab coat, still looking like a sad-sack, only sadder. The room still looked like a mock hotel suite minus the window and the suite, and I still had eighteen electrodes and gobs of paste and strips of tape plastered to my face, scalp, chest and legs.

    “I can’t sleep,” I told Johnny and he said, “Actually, you did. A little. Those electrodes on your head, remember?”

    Oh, those.

    “Is it three o’clock?” I asked. “I’m always awake at three o’clock.”

    “It’s edging to three.”

    His voice was soft, soothing. Or maybe it sounded that way. Maybe I wanted to hear a soft soothing voice at three o’clock in the morning in a nondescript building that housed a sleep clinic.

    “Well, at least I have someone to talk to,” I said, and he might have smiled.  I asked, “Is it boring, watching people sleep all night?”

    “Oh, you’d be surprised. I have stories you could wrap around the moon.” The adventures of Johnny-something, sleep technician. “Sometimes I have to call the police,” he said.

    “You’re kidding.”

    “Oh, you’d be surprised.” He looked smug, standing in the dark with the light from the hallway spilling in. He rocked back on his heels, holding on to those stories. I was too tired to dig.

    I slid my legs back under the sheet. “You must have sleep problems, working the night shift.”

    He deflated quickly. “You’re right. I only get about three hours.”

    Johnny-something, insomniac. Running a clinic for insomniacs. No wonder he looked sad.

    He asked, “Do you want to keep going?” and I figured why not, I was hooked up, three o’clock had come and gone and Johnny-something was decent company, even if he was in the next room watching me on a monitor. So I white-knuckled it through another few hours of fractured sleep, and at five-thirty he was back in the room, peeling off all eighteen wires. It took about five minutes to get them all off. While he hung the wires back on the hooks on the wall I asked, “Can you tell what’s keeping me awake?”

    Johnny shook his head. “We’re not supposed to. The doctors don’t like it. Once I told a woman she had sleep apnea and she screamed hysterically. You’d of thought I was murdering her.” He was chewing the cinnamon gum again. “There’s nine hundred pages to evaluate,” he said, “thirty seconds of recordings on each page. You won’t hear anything for a couple of weeks.” He walked me out the back door, my hair matted with glue, and there in the gray morning light he sighed and confessed that I had signs of sleep apnea.

    I didn’t scream.

    I looked him in the eyes. They were tight. I wanted to ask more, but he’d said too much already. I sent a silent thank-you to whoever had sent Johnny to watch over me.

    “That’s what I figured,” I said, and he perked up.

    “I’ll bet they schedule you for another night in the clinic,” he said, “with a CPAP machine.”

    I kept my gaze steady, imagining the sucking sounds that come from breathing through a mask all night. We both stood in silence and then he stepped back into the shadows of the clinic, and I got in my car and drove home.

    I’d found my answer.

    I’d play dumb when the doctor called with the results.

    Category Fer Cryin' Out Loud | Tags: ,,,,, | No Comments

  3. A Night in the Sleep Clinic, Part 2

    September 13, 2013 by Diane

    http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-image-robotic-female-connected-to-wires-abstract-internet-background-image31297156

    It was him and me. Him in a white lab coat and latex gloves; me in a loose T-shirt and leggings and flip flops. He approached, this man named Johnny something, holding a long wire. At one end was an electrode, at the other, a plug. Seventeen more wires hung on hooks on the wall. On a cart, someone had lined up a roll of gauze tape and a pot of paste to make sure all eighteen wires stayed glued to my skin. I was sitting on a rolling chair at the foot of a double bed in a small windowless room in a nondescript building that housed a laboratory for analyzing sleep problems. This is where my insomnia had driven me.

    And it’s where the hour-long process of wiring began.

    Johnny went back and forth between me and the wall of wires. I took two on the chin, one on the throat, two on the outer corners of my eyes and one in the center of my forehead. He ripped sections of  tape from the roll to hold them all down, and then pressed two more electrodes under my collarbone. He handed me another to press “right over the heart,” resting a gloved hand over his own.

    As if I didn’t know my own heart.

    As if the heavy pounding wouldn’t lead me to the right spot.

    Then came the belts, two of them, thick and webbed and designed to measure respiration. One for my chest, the other around my abdomen. He cinched both tight. Then came the paste. He scooped a dollop on his finger and globbed it on my scalp. Pressed an electrode into the mess and did it four more times until all five were in place. He fished a coiled wire from a plastic bag and unfurled it, revealing two plastic prongs. “These go up your nose,” he said, and slid the prongs into place, chomping on his cinnamon gum, his breath moist against my face. “Most people don’t like these,” he said.

    Hardly noticeable, I told myself.

    He fished another wire from a bag, and twanged a plastic filament clipped on the center. “This goes under your nose.” He pressed it into position and ripped off more tape. He gathered all of the wires into a huge ponytail that would cascade over my shoulder as I slept, and plugged the ends into a black box that would hang on the carved wooden headboard. He tossed aside the two pillows on the bed, pulled the covers down, and asked me to get in.

    I got in.

    But Johnny wasn’t done. As soon as I settled back he stuck four electrodes to my shins, plugged them into the black box, clamped a white plastic gizmo to my index finger to monitor oxygen levels, and plugged the black box into the wall. Finally, he stepped back to admire his work.

    “That’s the whole kit and caboodle,” he said, almost smiling. “You could wear that getup on Halloween.”

    I looked at him for several beats.

    “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

    I expected some change in his face, some shift of that almost-smile, but he wasn’t about to cave. He wedged himself between the bed and the night stand and unplugged the black box. He unclamped the white gizmo from my finger and watched as I hauled the box and all eighteen wires—four of them trailing behind—down the hall to the bathroom.

    I locked the door.

    I turned toward the mirror…and froze.

    Imagine a horror film.

    A low-budget horror film.

    Imagine the creature in this hypothetical low-budget horror film: a walking, mummified medical experiment gone awry with wires exploding from its scalp of matted hair. But the costumer ran out of gauze, so patches of human skin still showed through.

    That’s what stared back at me from the mirror.

    And he expects me to sleep in all this hardware.

    Piece of cake.

    …to be continued

     

    Category Fer Cryin' Out Loud | Tags: ,,,,, | 2 Comments

Older Entries
Newer Entries