Sleep Studying All Night

NOTE: Holy moly, this tops out at 1100 words. If professional blogging sites are to be believed, I just gave you three times your daily dose of quality content.

It’s official: I am now disabled.

Okay, I’m not really disabled. But I do have sleep apnea.

Okay, I’ve not yet been diagnosed with sleep apnea. But I did have to undergo a sleep study, and the nurse told me that the sleep specialist would likely diagnose me with apnea. Besides, after the well-crafted and extreme torture she put me through that night, there had better be something wrong with me. People just don’t go through that kind of hell if everything’s all right.

As you may remember, Angie is pretty insistent that I snore, so much so that she told me to talk to my doctor, Michael Angelo^*, about it. I must have sounded like a reverse hypochondriac^** to him:

“So yeah, Dr. Angelo, Angie says I snore.”
“Do you?”
“Well, it’s never woken me up.”
“I bet she’s just a light sleeper. Has she tried eating pork chop sandwiches in the morning?^***”
“No, but we’ll give that a go. Anyway, she wants me to have a sleep study.”
“Sure thing, Walter. Do you need anything else?”
“Well, I didn’t want to mention it, but this thing on my neck has gotten pretty big in the past week.”
“Let me get a scalpel and a bucket.”

The gears of medicine began to turn, lubricated by the grease of insurance, and the night of my sleep study was finally upon me. I had been told to wear comfortable pajamas, and maybe bring a magazine to read before bed. I filled out the appropriate surveys and medical waivers^****, then sat down beside a very nice bed.

A sleep study basically monitors four things: your breathing, your brain activity, your heart activity, and leg movement. Each of these is measured by rather itchy electrodes placed in the appropriate places. My brain activity was measured by having electrodes actually placed on my scalp. The nurse used an oil pencil to make where the electrodes would go.

Have you ever used an oil pencil? It doesn’t write on skin very well. I know for certain it doesn’t make a mark on scalp tissue unless it’s pressed down hard enough to fracture the skull. I have eight holes in my skull, and a possible case of oil pencil poisoning. Paleontologists will dig up my skull in a thousand years and marvel that we, being a sophisticated race that produced Diet Coke AND YouTube, still practiced trepanation.

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. I would have rather been stabbed by a thousand oil pencils than what came next: things were put in my nose. I cannot stand to have a nose hair out of place, much less have something larger than a hair placed in my nose. I had won the Nose Lottery that night: not only was a breathing tube, designed to measure the amount of air exhaled through my nose, jammed in each nostril, but a thermistor was also placed up in there to determine if I was breathing through my nose or my mouth.

What’s a thermistor? It’s basically exposed metal that senses the heat from your breath. Did I mention it was exposed metal? You know, the kind with rather sharp edges? And that it was in my nose? And that I hated having regular things, like nose hairs and fingers, in my nose? Oh, it was going to be a great night!

My nurse finally left me to get some sleep. I fought the urge for a good five minutes before my body realized I hadn’t slept much the night before, and wasn’t going to miss this opportunity to get some shut-eye without having Angie wake it up. I dozed off to that blissful place between sleeping and being awake when the light came on and the nurse came in.

“Are you having chest pains, Mr. Shumate?”
“Buwha?”
“Your heart monitor shows you’re having a heart attack.”
“Well, I’m having them now. Thanks.”

Turns out, it was just a bad electrode on the heart monitor. Ha, don’t you love hospital hijinks? I’m glad the brain monitor was working, or else I could have ended up lobotomized. I knew I wouldn’t be back asleep again, at least not for a while. Once again, my body made a big ol’ liar out of me.

I managed to get two hours of sleep this time, before the light came on. My nose hurt.

“Mr. Shumate, you’ve had thirty breathing events in the past two hours.”

I certainly wasn’t able to process what a “breathing event” was at that point, and I’m not sure I know, now. It could be something as simple as a snore, or I could have stopped breathing for seconds on end. There’s not a lot of breathing in “breathing events,” it seems. The nurse started taking the air monitor out of my nose.

“Oh, thank God, that was starting to bother me. Not as bad as the thermistor, though.”
“Oh, we’re keeping that in.”
“Yeah, of course you are.”

The nurse had decided that, since I wasn’t breathing in my sleep, she would force the issue. She brought out a nose mask and hooked it into a device she called a CPAP. I’d heard of these things, they were supposed to force air into your lungs. She strapped the mask to my face, where it started to dig the thermistor further into my nose.

“Nurse, this kind of hurts.”
“Yeah, but this is how it’s done.”

The Hippocratic Oath, my left eye. I was now hooked up to a foreign machine that was forcing air into my nose, there were metal wires digging into my nostrils, and I was being asked to breath through my nose. There was absolutely no way I could go to sleep with this amount of discomfort…

And then, I woke up five hours later. The nurse removed me from the CPAP, took the electrodes off and left me to drive home. I felt violated.

And now, I get to do it again, this time to get fitted for a CPAP of my very own.

Earplugs for Angie would have been so much better.

^*I swear that is his real name.
^**Or a regular guy.
^***I also swear that this is his solution to most of our problems. Eating a big breakfast of pig and bread must be prescribed in the Journal Of The American Medical Association, or at least Pork Weekly.
^****In essence, “Don’t sue us if you die in your sleep. Hey, it happens.”

Tagged as: humor