Play One on TV

A couple of nights ago, I was the victim… er, I mean the subject of a sleep study. It seems that I might be suffering from that modern-day male malady known as sleep apnea.

My journey to the sleep lab began with a rather insistent plea from my wife, who was becoming concerned at my new-found ability to suspend breathing for upwards of a minute at a time. Normally, this would not be cause for alarm, but I was doing this in my sleep. Considering that my snoring has been likened to the braying of a grizzly bear in the throes of indigestion, you would think that occasional bouts of nighttime silence would be welcome. Nonetheless, her panicked pronouncements of, “Oh, my God, you’re not breathing!” finally convinced me to visit the family doctor.

The doctor quizzed me on several points:

• Was I sleepy during the day? Yes.
• Did I tend to drop off when reading or watching movies? Yes, especially if Harry Potter was involved.
• Was I having trouble staying asleep all night? Yes, but only because my dog has the bladder control of a 50 cent water gun.
• Did I ever get sleepy while driving? Yes, but I was still way safer than any cell-phone bearing soccer mom.
• Did I wake up frequently with morning headaches? Yes, but if you worked in a corporate MIS department, you’d be hitting the Excedrin pretty darned hard yourself, bub.
• Do I snore? No. Well, yes. So I’m told. (see grizzly bear comment above)
• Have I gained weight recently? Hey! My mother just says I’m big-boned, so I must be going through a skeletal growing spurt or something.
• Has my blood pressure been higher than normal? Well, if triple-digits on both sides of the slash are considered high, then yes.

According to the doctor, I was “hitting all the high points.” Now there’s a phrase you never want to hear on the diagnostic table. “So, Doc, do I have Ultramarine Bird Flu?” “Well, you’re hitting all the high points!” I grudgingly admitted that he may have a point. My sleep quality has been a diminishing comfort for quite some time, perhaps over the last two or three years. I had been considering it a hazard of growing older, but he assured me that my symptoms were not normal and needed to be looked at more carefully.

He suggested that I do a sleep study. Once he explained that someone else, not me, would be doing all the actual studying, I was all for it. He dutifully scrawled out a referral note in that incomprehensible heiroglyphic code that all doctors use to befuddle their patients (I suspect they’re using it to pass love notes to the pharmacist) and sent me on my way.

About a week later, I found myself in the sleep labs of Mercy Hospital. The hospital is run by the Sisters of Mercy, a Catholic order. I’m always vaguely nervous about doing anything at Mercy Hospital. Thanks to my secondary school education at a Catholic high school, I have this irrational fear of nuns (yes, I know it’s a bad habit). Maybe I’m worried I’ll die on the table at Mercy, and my last image of life will be Sister Mary Margaret waving a ruler at me.

Fortunately, there were no nuns greeting me at the door. Instead, there was a pleasant technician named Mitzi who escorted me to a rather nicely appointed room, complete with a wrought-iron four-poster bed and decent furnishings. Only the camera in the ceiling and the imposing bundle of wires on the nightstand suggested that this was more than a nice hotel room.

Mitzi calmly explained how this whole thing was going to work — I would sleep, and she would watch. Sounded vaguely illegal to me, but she had a lot more schooling than me, so who was I to complain? She further explained that I was being evaluated for the prescription of a “CPAP device” (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure), which is a breathing apparatus that eliminates the apnea. In order to “qualify” for the CPAP, I had to sleep at least two hours by 2:00 am, and I had to have a certain number of “apnea incidents” of at least 10 seconds or longer.

My sleeping had to go through a qualification round? Nothing like a little performance anxiety in the bedroom to make a guy all nervous.

She sat me down in a chair, turned on the television to give me something to watch (where I once again verified Fox News’ reputation as the “world’s angriest newscast”), and proceeded to attach about half-a-bajillion wires to my skull, torso, and legs. She carefully explained what each wire was for — this one monitored my REM (rapid eye movements), this one measured the oxygen entering my nose, this one monitored my heart rate, this one would shock me if I failed to phrase my response in the form of a question, etc.

By the time Mitzi was done, I looked like the subject of a Thomas Dolby song. I had so much wire attached that Sirius Satellite Radio should have sued me for signal piracy. She then laid me down on the bed (yes, she had to help me lie down. I was afraid to move for fear of accidentally garrotting myself). She turned down the lights and went into the next room to, as she said, “calibrate the equipment.” Next thing I knew, there was a bright light shining in my eyes, and a voice on the intercom was saying “roll your eyes up and down, please.” I almost instinctively gave my name, rank, and serial number.

After a few more weird body motions to complete the calibration (blink twice; flex your feet; cough; bark like a dog) she came back in, covered me up, and told me “Good night!”

Good night? She was kidding, right? Here I was, trussed up like a high-tech turkey from the breakroom kitchen at Wired magazine, and she wanted me to go to sleep? To make matters worse, I was on my back, and I cannot — I repeat, cannot sleep on my back. As icing on the cake, there was a purple light bulb above me that allowed Mitzi to use the camera to spy on me, and I have trouble going to sleep when there’s any light in the room.

All in all, it wasn’t an ideal situation for slumber. The four-hour time limit and apnea quota did nothing to relax me further. The only thing going for me was that I had just come off a weekend camping trip with the Boy Scouts, so I was rather physically worn out. I hoped it would be enough to counteract the rather bizarre environment.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. I dutifully closed my eyes, calmed my breathing, and counted every sheep I ever knew (in multiple breeds, even), but just as it seemed I was about to drop off, something would cause me to rouse back to full wakefullness. Because of the monitoring wires, I couldn’t even have the satisfaction of tossing and turning. I spent the next four hours in this limbo between sleep and non-sleep, becoming more and more agitated as the 2:00 am deadline loomed. My worst fear? What if I didn’t sleep at all, and I had to come in and do this again? I swear, if there had been a hammer in the room, I would have cheerfully clubbed myself into unconsciousness.

Finally, 2:00 am arrived, and Mitzi arrived on schedule. I was ready with a plausible explanation of why I couldn’t sleep (I was enjoying the memory foam mattress so much that I wanted to prolong the sensation) when I noticed she had some sort of hose-type contraption in her hand. She cheerfully advised me that I had definitely qualified for the CPAP study.

Eh? I swore to her that I hadn’t slept at all (and would have sworn on the Gideon Bible that was surely in the nightstand drawer, except that I would have ripped out about 10 electrodes to reach it). She told me that I had definitely slept, and that I had demonstrated several apnea episodes.

Wow. I realized that my repeated returns to full wakefulness weren’t just due to a restless mind. I was returning to wakefulness because I could not breathe. With a chill in my spine, I reluctantly admitted to myself that there might be something to this apnea diagnosis after all.

Mitzi hooked me up to the CPAP machine, which consisted of a funky nasal mask, air hose, and a humidifying air pump. I felt like a low-rent Darth Vader who had not saved up enough for the full mask. She explained that the mask would deliver normal room air at an increased pressure, which would serve to keep my palate, uvula, and other soft dangly throat bits out of the way. In short, it would keep me breathing while I slept.

Unfortunately, we quickly discovered that the nose mask wasn’t doing the trick. I am apparently a mouth-breather, although I prefer the term “nasally challenged.” I’ve suffered from seasonal allergies all my life, and the day’s camping activities had served to neatly inflame my nasal passages. Mitzi then swapped the nose mask out and brought in a full nose-and-mouth affair, just like the ones you see on E.R.

She then threw me another cheery “Good night!” and left me to sleep. Now, not only was I wired to the gills and on my back, but I had on an air mask that was blowing air into me like I was a trumpet and it was Louis Armstrong.

Oddly enough, I fell asleep almost immediately. And I stayed asleep until 6:00 am. Ain’t modern technology wonderful?

So, boys and girls, it sounds like your Uncle Joe is on his way to getting a CPAP machine of his very own. I won’t actually know for a couple of weeks, which is the time required to correlate the study data and deliver it to my family doctor. At least it gives me enough time to juggle the finances so I can pay for the bloody thing.

In the meantime, I’m discovering that there’s a lot of other guys out there that suffer from this same malady. For some reason, about every third guy that I mention this to says, “Yeah, I have apnea too. Been using a CPAP for years.” It’s like finding out everyone around you has been a Shriner and you never figured it out (but without the circus ticket solicitations). I guess I’m joining some sort of fraternal order of the plastic nose mask, or something.

If you’ve stuck with this post all the way to this point, I’ll assume you want to know how this all turns out. I’ve been promised that this treatment will significantly alter my quality of life, but I generally associate “quality of life” with the saving, not spending, of large amounts of money. Time will tell.

However, if you find yourself breathlessly awaiting my update, you may want to see my doctor.