Last night I had a sleep study. I think this is a misnomer. I think it should be called a Sleep Test. They were studying me—I was not studying anything, except, for a few minutes, the funky pink light under the thing they wrapped around my left index finger to monitor the blood flow through my capillaries.
Jeez, you might be thinking, this is an awfully lot of medical procedures you’re enduring lately. Strange ones, too. I know it. I’ll tell you all about it when there’s something specific to say.
But it should’ve been a sleep test. I was being tested for sleep apnea and given absolutely no study materials. I started in an ENT office, answering a questionnaire for a nurse who, after every answer I gave, would look at me, squinty-eyed. I could hear her thinking, “Oh yes, fat woman, you have the apnea.” That is, when I couldn’t hear her thinking, “Liar!” But the actual doctor came in and when I got over her crazy spiky hair, measured my neck and looked all up my nose and down my throat with crazy steel implements while I sat in the Bauhaus version of a dentist chair and tried not to look at the huge pictures of infected ear drums hung on the walls. The doctor shook her head and clucked her tongue and made a lot of notes and I tried not to cry, even though I felt like, relative scariness of chair and devices aside, there was nothing to cry about.
“Your tongue is very wide,” she said. I was too upset to say what any woman hearing that comment should say which is, “Oh yes it is. It most certainly is… very… wide.” I said, “Mmm.” I know I have a wide tongue. So what? It’s always been like this; it goes with my big lips and I play a fair-to-decent French horn and kiss really well.
“Your soft palate is too low,” she continued. I used my extra wide tongue to reach back that and poke at my soft palate. It could not be prodded into being higher, that I know of, so I also said, “Mmmm.”
“And your uvula is too long,” she finished. I really wanted to demand a AMA approved chart of uvula lengths comparing normal and abnormal uvulas, indicating at what extremes a uvula would be considered too long or too short. I want to know what sort of program there is for people whose lives are hindered by this problem.
But she wasn’t finished. I had my tonsils (in this day and age! Tonsils!) and all my adenoids and my neck was 15 whole inches around. At this point, I was really trying not to cry, half because I was scared about what all these factors meant and half because I felt stupid for wanting to cry at all. Also, like, are we judging people on the lengths of their uvulas now? Sleep study warranted to rule out apnea.
So I got to the Sleep Center, which was a nice mauve and taupe cross between a hospital and dorm room. They claim it’s supposed to look like a motel, but I say add a lava lamp and a picture of John Belushi in a sweatshirt that says “COLLEGE” and many people will feel yet more at home. I had to watch a video on apnea and its cure, a CPAP machine. Then I put on my pajamas and read for awhile until it was my turn to try on the CPAP machine. It was crazy with straps and hoses and I kept giggling and the nurse kept trying not to giggle with me. And you can’t really talk when wearing one or I really would have said, “These are not the droids you’re looking for” because I totally felt like a storm trooper.
Then my nurse wired up my head with something like 12 different electrodes. And a ground wire. Then wired my face, my throat and neck, both halves of my chest, my side and put one under my right breast, then both legs. There were really long wires absolutely everywhere—around my skull and up my pants and down my shirt. I kept thinking, “Oh gawd, I’m going to have to pee just from perversity.” All the wires ended up jacked into this little box full of receptors for the wires and a big PCI slot on one end. She handed the whole rig to me—like the big blue palm-pilot of a mad scientist and said, “Okay, if you need to go to the bathroom, you can go now.” It was really terribly easy.
Then I took two Ambien and tried to go to sleep flat on my back. This was difficult. I felt really put out by this and my ears kept itching, but they were surrounded in wire and I didn’t want to knock an electrode off. I tried to pray, and pretend that Christopher was there, and then tried to think relatively tames thoughts of Professor Snape and then resorted to counting backward. Except I couldn’t think straight and would count like, “99, 98, 97, 96, 89, 80.” Several deep breaths. “79, 40, 27, 28, 29. Where was I? 89, 90, 91.” I was frustrated.
But evidently I sleep like a champ because it felt like five minutes later the nurse came over the speaker to say, “Sweetie, your oxygen is low, we’re going to put the CPAP on you.” I found it hard to talk so, okay. And she came in and said, “I was afraid you were going to have to come back, but this last REM period your oxygen went low!” I strapped the storm trooper rig back on and went back to sleep, I guess, though it didn’t really feel like going to sleep. But I woke up, so I guess I must have been.
I’m still not real clear on what my deal is. I sleep fine, no snoring, no teeth grinding, no restless legs, deep, even breaths. But when I go into REM sleep, my oxygen levels slowly start to go down. And for each period of it (and I found out we all have four-five periods of REM a night) my oxygen just gets a little lower every time. Evidently I was down to 70 around 4:00 a.m. and she seemed to think that this was a big damn deal.
I don’t know where I go from here, other than to figure out how to get the rest of the electrode goop out of my hair—that shit is tenacious. I guess I’m going to have to get a CPAP machine, which I will refer to as “The Stormtrooper Rig” just so I don’t feel like such a damn failure. But I suppose there are worse things in life than pseudo-sleep-apnea that turn you into a stormtrooper. Like being an actual storm trooper. Or Hayden Christenson. That would suck.
