A Night in the Lab

I got to the sleep lab at 8:30 the night before Thanksgiving, and the beautiful Patrick greeted me at the back door. A few minutes later I was sitting in my pajamas on a chair while Patrick and Linda (also beautiful) affixed what felt like hundreds of electrodes to my body. I made small talk, cracked sleep-lab-appropriate jokes, and was finally taken to the bedroom, tastefully done in 90's Marriott. I got into bed, being careful not to tangle myself in the wires. Patrick connected a monitor to my thumb, shoved some tubes up my nose, and bid me goodnight. Linda came in, gave me some suggestions about visualizations, and then with a huge Mommielike smile said good night, turned off the light and closed the door. I lay there, trussed like the turkey I would be eating the next day, staring at the infrared camera aimed at me, and tried desperately to sleep. I learned later it was almost three hours later before I first slept.



All through the night various electrodes and tubes came loose, which necessitated darling Patrick to come into the room and try to reaffix them. It was very nice to suddenly have a sweet young lab tech hovering over my face, whispering to me, and adjusting things. If it weren't for the tangle of wires I would've enjoyed it.


I finally couldn't stand lying in the same position anymore, and heaved onto my side, causing all hell to break loose, along with about half the wires. Where the hell is the wireless technology for this?


It was too damned hot. The bed was too pillowtop/memoryfoam comfortable, if you know what I mean. The sensation of being filmed and watched and hovered over completely killed any chance I had to really sleep. Plus I had a John Meyer song repeating ad nauseum in my head ("I want to run through the halls of my high school , I wanna scream at the top of my lungs. . .") And so it went, interminably, until I was awakened at 6:30 am and told the experiment was completed.


I had all the electrodes ripped from my hairy parts, got dressed, and went to the master control room where I joined delicious Patrick, who by then was quite tired (the irony of working in a sleep lab is that you're exhausted all the time because you're up all night monitoring sleeping people). He showed me my "test" on a huge monitor, the screen striped like an american flag with feedback bars, and in the corner the video of me in bed. Each bar represented a breathing pattern or a heartbeat or a teeth-grinding pressure, etc. He fast-forwarded through until when I finally fell asleep, the little picture of me in the corner frenetically tossing and turning.


He showed me that, within a second or two of falling asleep, I stop breathing, and am reawakened by the effort to breathe again, 10 seconds or 20 seconds, even 30 seconds or more after I stop breathing. Then I lay there for a minute until I fall asleep again, and repeat the pattern. Hundreds of times. Getting absolutely no value from my sleep. Dropping my state of oxygenation in my body from the normal 99% to as low as 70%. Patrick said he really felt for me, can understand why I'm so tired all the time, why I wake up feeling more exhausted than I felt going to bed, why I'm addicted to coffee. He admitted he wanted to rush in and hook me up to an oxygen tank to help me breathe, he was so worried for me. Aww. Lab lovespeak.

So it's official - I have severe sleep apnea. I'll be returning to the lab very soon to test-run a PAP (positive air pressure) machine, which appears to be a miracle cure for peeps like me.

In a post-test questionnaire, Patrick asked me how I felt, and I said that, honestly, I was really delighted because now I have the potential to sleep well again, and that's something I've been (day)dreaming about for a long time. It would be such a vacation for me, to go to sleep and stay asleep, to wake up feeling refreshed. OMG, I'm sooooooooooo ready!!