Perchance to Dream

"The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than to fly to others we know not of?" --W. Shakespeare- Hamlet


So I am now girding myself for round 2 in my fight with sleep disorder. Apnea? Hypopnea? Something like that. It's the snoring is what it is...and it bothers the Wife. Yeah, there's all kinds of reasons to get a Good Night's Sleep. And not a few involve serious health issues. I can't argue with peer-reviewed clinical studies, and besides that, who doesn't wanna sleep better if not more?

This will be, as I said, Round 2. Memory of the first bout is not a good one. As our local hospital is lacking a "sleep study center" they rely on a "portable" one from a hospital a hundred miles away. Yes, portable. As in "it has tires on it".

So this is what went down; on the coldest night of the year in Northern Michigan I was told to report (with my Jammies) to a semi-trailer parked out back, behind the hospital's dumpster. Truly. I should point out at this juncture that I have, indeed, slept in a semi before as well as having had the opportunity to also nap behind a dumpster. Hell, I ain't proud.

Inside of this super-camper I met "Dave". He was the sandman. The technician. The s.o.b. that was paid to watch me sleep. But a nice guy, really-- if you could manage to ignore how his skewed circadian rhythms had now rendered him a ghoulish remnant of his former self...But that is not important. He showed me his console of machinery-- the video monitors, the oscilloscopes, the machines that go "bing". He led me to the aft cabin on his Ship of Dreams.

So I changed into my mis-matched pajamas, read a lttle bit of Conrad, and waited for Dave to knock on the door and tuck me in. When he did show up (about the time that Jim jumped ship) my angst was just getting warmed up. It is important to note that my "normal" sleeping environs are isolated and insulated-- no light, no noise, no strange man sitting just outside an unlocked door watching me on cctv...

Dave tried explaining to me what all the wires were for. Something like thirty-two of them were glued to my noggin, my face, chest, back, and legs, then bundled behind me in some sort of electrified Avatar ponytail which, I was assured, rarely posed any problems for the subjects being studied as they slept. There I was--all wired-up and ready for slumber.

Lights out? Not. Musta been a dozen or more LED monitor lights in that "bedroom", some of them blinking. Lights out? Not. The crack under the door was about the size of those to be found on an outhouse door. Quiet time? You mean besides the ambient noises from the machines that go "bing" just outside the door? How about that rattle and hum from the electric heaters which just managed to keep the center of the room from freezing while the sides maintained a temperature just below the frost threshold? And then there was the fact that what I was sleeping (trying) in, essentially, was a tin can? The night's cold and the heaters' so-called "heat" were duking it out all night, and the blows they landed on each other resonated with the screech-POP of metal expansion/contraction.

And then there was the ponytail. Exactly how many vignette-length nightmares which featured strangulation I endured that night is unknown. I recall about a half-dozen "untanglings" throughout the course of the study. Between the lights, noises, and near-throttling it became a study in sleeplessness.

It was followed by the ultimate awakening-- one of those mornings when you could swear you had just lain down-- NO WAY it was morning already! But there it was, and there I was, listening to Dave telling me how many events occurred during my night's sleep. Dave would say things like "And here was an interuption of REM that caused an arousal." or "This graph shows that your brain waves show the excitability lines of a completely awake state". And over and over again I thought "No shit, Dave! Here was where the sheet-metal next to my head snapped, and here was where you knocked-over your thermos, and here was where the blower-bearing on the heater was drying out." But I did not say such things, for I was aware that a well-deserving MD was relying on her commissions on yet another $2000 C-PAP machine sale in order to get the fuck out of this frigid arctic air-- get herself to Belize.

I guess I've got it. Apnea, that is. Soon to find out if I'll be spending 1/3 of my life wearing a mask. But if that don't do it, there's always that DSM V. When that book hits the shelves we'll all be wearing one.