As many of you might know I had a sleep study last night (Sunday). Let me share with you just a tiny bit about me and my "sleep". Put simply I don't really sleep, I snooze. I know that I dream and mostly always remember my dreams. I know that dreams happen in REM sleep so at points throughout my night I snatch a few minutes of REM. My husband and I sleep in separate bedrooms because he snores so loudly. On the last night we slept together I woke him up and told him that if he didn't go to the couch I would stab him in the neck. At that moment I meant it and probably would have done it. I have 2 cats and they love sleeping on me, near me and under the covers. This means bliss for me but not for husband. I also sleep with a fan which makes the room pretty cold. Once I get cold I tend to burrito myself in the blankets---husband needless to say, has spent many a night with nothing more than a corner of a sheet. I also have this particularly strange sleep behavior in where I sit up. I scoot back up against my pillows, prop my knees up with a towel and then rest my elbows on my knees and my head in my hand. I can sleep like this for what seems like hours in truth it's only until my hands and legs have fallen asleep at which point I will scoot forward three spaces, lay down and go back to sleep.
Based solely on my weight my doctor scheduled this sleep study. The instructions to this "lab" were not as clear as I would have liked them so I sat in my wheelchair knocking on the glass door to be let in. No one answered the door.....because I was at the wrong building. Once I got reoriented I found the lab, checked in and was immediately wired for sound! If you've never done something like this, you have an electrode under your left eye, you have them in your hair/scalp, you have them on your chin, your chest, your legs and you back. All total some 20 electrodes with their long tails that are plugged into a little white box. I was told that they would be watching me all night long. I warned them about my sitting up, I instructed them not to be alarmed because it's the equivalent of turning over....nothing is wrong just let me be.They also warned me that if I stopped breathing at least 20 times with an hour I would be hooked up to a PAP machine. This above all scared me! I DO NOT like anything around my face. Even if it is life giving air, I will panic. So off to bed I go. Meditation music playing in my ear buds, breathing steady and slowly. In a short while I sat up and I am startled by a loud speaker behind me asking me "Nicole are you okay?" to which I replied "It's NAOMI and I'm fine". After a while I laid back down. Throughout the night I tried to get comfy. The bed was too soft the pillows to puffy. The room was supposed to be dark but the space between the floor and the bottom of my door let the storage room light, always on, beam into my room, find my eyes with laser like precision and the person in the room in front of me was snoring. I also sat up, as predicted several more times throughout the night and every time I had the mysterious loud speaker ask me if I needed help.
My technician came in and out of the room 4-5 different times for what I don't know, but the last trip in was her putting the friggin mask on my face.She wasn't listening when I told her I sleep sitting up but she heard me loud and clear about nothing on my face. In my half dazed stooper I hear this very loud rushing air getting closer to my face. Then like some sinister alien bug it suctioned itself to my nose. The rushing air went quiet and the technician said " I know you want to take it off but you can't. Just listen to your music and you"ll be awake soon and we can take it off". Reluctantly I obliged. I realized that as I breathed the machine was breathing. So I forced myself to breath slowly and peacefully I resolved that if I couldn't do it I was rip the gear off and the test be damned! I recall a dream in where I was saving people in a park that resembled Chernobyl and only when all were saved could I take my mask off. I was wakened by the fact that my mouth had relaxed opened and there was a rush of air coming out. As long as I kept my mouth shut, I would not have my lips literally flappin in the breeze! I was officially woken up some ungodly hour (6am) and asked to do a litany of "exercises" which were done with the PAP still on my nose. One of the things I had to do was count to 3 and I can tell you that if I wasn't so pissed about the lack of sleep I would have found funny the fact that my lips were struggling to form any of the numbers without their flapping!
Go ahead...grab you upper lip with you thumbs and fore finger and simulate rapid movement while you're trying to say ONE.......TWO........THREE..... did you do it? You did, didn't you?
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