Sleep Study

I snore. Since I’m sleeping when I do it, I have no awareness of it, but Dawn swears to it, so I must. I have gone through a couple of sleep studies when we lived in Indiana, and they diagnosed me with mild sleep apnea. Despite Dawn’s strong urging, I never pursued any treatment like CPAP, because I thought I would never be able to sleep with a ginormous mask over my face all night.

Well, recently, my fatigue has been pretty severe during the daytime, and after consulting with our doctor, she ordered me to go through another sleep study.

I have talked to a few people who have CPAP now (turns out that MANY people do…), and they all said it was a “life-changing” decision. So, of course, now I’m excited about getting on this bandwagon.

At 8:30pm on 4/3, I admitted myself at St. Elizabeth Sleep Disorder Center in Edgewood, KY, for the sleep study. You get your own private bedroom equipped with your own shower bathroom and a TV. The bed is the Sleep Number bed for your comfort. You get free WiFi, too.

Left: Sleep study bedroom. Right: Infrared surveillance camera on ceiling

I was thinking/hoping that this would be a comfortable one-night stay with all of these amenities. Then my technician Suzanne attached bunch of nodes all over my body.

Cyborg Hachi

Bunch of nodes on my head, a few on my chest and my legs. So many cables were bundled behind my neck like a ponytail. Still, I thought I would be able to get used it pretty quick. Of course, as I told Suzanne that I’m ready to go to sleep, she came in with a chest band, a belly band, and tube to sit in your nostrils and in front of your mouth, all of which to detect your breathing…

I lied down in the dark trying hard to fall asleep, but I just couldn’t. It usually takes a few minutes or seconds for me to fall asleep at home, so it felt very awkward after a while. The tubes in my nose felt increasingly uncomfortable. Then I’m thinking, “I gotta pee…” I hated myself for not peeing before she hooked me all up, but I really didn’t have to, then…

Feeling childish, I pressed the call button, so she can unhook all the cables that she connected a several minutes earlier.

Apparently, I did fall a sleep at some point, but I did not feel rested at ALL when she woke me up at 6:45am. She said she got enough data to make an analysis, but I don’t know how you can get any good data from anybody if everybody has to go to sleep feeling like I did. Maybe that’s why there are so many diagnoses for sleep disorders…