Tested in your sleep

So last night was a different night for me. It started out the same as most Wednesdays would; work all day, hit the gym, then dinner with Jen. [And the gym was a GREAT workout, including 35 minutes on the machine I call the glider – mostly because NO ONE seems to know what it is called – where I burned 749 calories in 35 minutes!]

But that is where the normalcy ended for this particular Wednesday. After gobbling down dinner [two grilled chicken taco wraps], I hugged and kissed Jen and headed off to bed – in a sleep lab in East Providence!

Let me back up here for a minute. About a year ago, after snoring through my sleeping (if you can call it that), I had an appointment with Dr. Sharkey, a sleep doctor for lack of a better term (I think she is a doctor of sleep medicine as an actual title). After a 20-minute conversation in her office, and the obligatory poking and prodding to determine what was quite obvious at the time (“you are overweight, young and a man – three things that are key components to sleep apnea), I was booked for a sleep study in East Providence.

This is the opposite of a good night’s sleep. Seriously. My first time there, a little over a year ago, was torturous. Having never been to one before, I had no idea what to expect. So I headed there with my two pillows and a book to read, ready to take on this challenge.

For a sleep study, I provided very little sleep for which they could study. In technical terms, I average 150-or-so “incidents” per hour, which means I basically stopped breathing about 150 times per hour over a 6-hour study. I was immediately in the upper echelon category for sleep apnea. It meant I wasn’t getting a night of sleep, good or bad, because every time I drifted off to sleep, I would stop breathing, which would keep my brain awake, which would then awaken me, and this process happened 150 times per hour!



An example of what someone looks like sleeping with a CPAP mask.



So after that first study, I was booked for a second study a week later, a follow-up where I would again be hooked up to a hundred wires on my head, forehead, stomach, chest, legs, etc., only this time I would be going as a “fighter pilot,” wearing a sleeping mask on my face. What this device does is pumps air into a mask that is attached to my head (just like a fighter pilot) and keep my airwaves open so that I can fall asleep and not have these incidents.



It worked, and my incidents per hour sharply decreased once I was hooked up to the mask. So the diagnosis was to be fitted with my own home model of the device to wear every night. This would help me sleep at night, feel less tired during the day (because, well, I would be sleeping at night) and would help with weight loss because my body would be recovering from workouts better with a good night’s sleep.



I wore the mask religiously for the winter and spring until about this June, when it felt like it became more of a nuisance and the fact that I had been falling asleep without it and not having these incidents.

My next appointment with Dr. Sharkey, a very busy woman, was postponed twice by her office (with one rescheduled to a date that, um, the secretary never told me about!) and my May meeting with her happened LAST WEEK (Nov. 3). After seeing how I had lost weight and hearing that I wasn’t wearing the mask anymore, she deemed it necessary to have a THIRD sleep test to see how I was doing without said mask and how to proceed (no mask at all going forward, lower pressure on the mask, etc).

So last night I got all hooked up again. It was supposed to be a “split test,” meaning I would go to sleep normally, then awoken in the middle of the study and fitted with the mask for the remainder of the study.



This is what I looked like last night after the technician
attached all the wires to me. Doesn't it look like fun?



After having the 567762346914724 wires connected to me (its more like 20, but it seems like so many more when the process is happening), I feel asleep around 11:30 in a strange room inside a sleep lab in East Providence. I tossed and turned. I was in and out of sleep. It is tough because not only do you have all these wires attached to you, they are subsequently attached to two machines that send signals back to the technician in the “sleep study room” down the hall. So you can’t randomly get up during the night without the technician coming into the room and disconnecting you.

And I had to pee.

But I waited. And fell back to sleep. And turned on my side. And waited. I waited for the technician to come in to start part two of the test. To hook me up to the mask.

But I still had to pee.

Should I say something? Can I hold it in? But as I am holding it in, I am getting uncomfortable. But then I would fall asleep. Finally, I couldn’t take it, and called for the technician. Who informed me that ….. she would be right there because the test was over.

It was morning. Granted, it was 5:15am, but the test only goes until 5:30. So she unhooked me, peeled tape and tabs off of me and pulled wires off of me from all parts of my body. I asked her if I passed the test because she didn’t come in to put the mask on. Her response was that I was right at the line between needing it and not, but was never in a “bad area” so they kept the single test going.

She may have said some other stuff, but I had to shuffle out of the room quickly.

I still had to pee.