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When I sleep, I don’t mind being held.  What I do mind is the thought of somebody sitting all night long and watching me sleep.  I don’t even like falling asleep when there is someone else in the house.  I can’t stand it if they’re in the next room, it’s like when someone walks into a public restroom when I’m on the toilet.  The pucker factor occurs, quite literally.  I can’t preform in front of an audience, I um, choke up.

When someone is actually sharing a bed with me, on the few occasions that this has occurred, I always lay awake until I know that the person is asleep.  It’s not a conscious decision, it happens whether I want it to or not, sometimes to great frustration to me.  I don’t much care for people to have an advantage over me, and being asleep puts one at a great disadvantage.

I told you that story to tell you this story:

Over the last year or so I have been slowly but surely noticing my health slipping.  I am always tired, even after sleeping all day.  I’ve been getting progressively weaker, losing endurance and stamina, become constantly irritable and easily angered.  I went from working out 3 hours a day 4-6 days a week, and running in 5K’s a year ago, to going to the gym 2-3 days and then eventually not at all.  I keep trying to go back and I spend a couple of hours there on a Monday and then I’m exhausted for 4 days straight.  I love, love, love riding my bike.  It was my escape and I’ve gone from riding 30-50 miles to not being able to make it up my street and back.

At first I blamed it on poor eating habits.  Then it was a hectic schedule.  I thought it was being out in the sun all day.  But it’s gotten progressively worse.   I come home from work, sit in my LayZboy and fall asleep.  I wake up in the evening for  an hour or 2 and then I go back to sleep till the morning when I start all over again.  Sunday, I usually spend all day in bed or in my LayZboy, dozing off and on all day.  I of course, being a hypochondriac, start thinking Diabetes, Mono, Lupus, Cancer, Who knows what.   I’ve always had the mindset that if I have some horrible terminal disease I don’t want to know about it.  i just want to wake up dead one day.  But this hasn’t killed me in nearly a year so instead it’s really getting in the way of life, so I’ve been going to the doctor.

My doctor ordered complete labs and blood works, but he thought it might be sleep apnea and recommended a sleep study.  I’m familiar with sleep apnea and know from my (poor) sleep habits that it was likely, but I did not want to do a sleep study.  I decided to wait for all the test and maybe I’d be ‘lucky’ and it’ll be Diabetes or something.  After everything came in it turned out that according to the test I was healthy as a horse.  Blood sugar good, cholesterol good.  Blood pressure, thyroid, enzymes, everything all good.  No Lupus, No Anemia, No Diabetes, No Cancer.  Shit!

He put me on medication for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and it’s helped during the day but I still crash hard.  I finally decided I had no choice but to do the sleep study, and I was NOT happy about it at all.  I went in Saturday (yesterday) at 8pm, after a long day at work.  I was expecting some kind of medical facility.  It was in a strip center behind a car dealership.  Not a very comforting first impression.

Overall the place was OK.  The room was very nice and clean and they had a great big bed.

Then they start hard wiring you in.  I don’t like to be touched by strangers, and I don’t like things on my face.  This involved both, as this tech is gluing wires all over my head, face, chest and legs.  By the end of it, I was so wired for sound that if I stood just so I though I might be getting FM radio reception.

Then they put you in bed, plug you in and shut the light.  And there I laid, for a long long while.  I just kept thinking of that IR camera looking at me.  The wires were uncomfortable  and every time you tried to move you got caught on something.  Try gluing a string to your forehead and every time you move, pull on it.  Then multiply it by 20.  I had wires glued to my legs (hairs) and every time I’d move my legs, which I do a lot, it would pull hair.  And then again, the IR camera.  I was laying there  thinking about them watching me and feeling dirty.  ick

Now the first night was supposed to be them watching me sleep.  Then they were supposed to review the results with the doctor and if needed I would then come back for a second sleep study to try using the CPAP machine (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure).  Sleep apnea is a disorder where you stop breathing throughout the night and the CPAP  is a device that forces air into your nose while you sleep, essentially breathing for you.  When you stop breathing the brain signals the body to wake up, and this happens many times a night so you never get to REM stage sleep and therefore you don’t get rest.  Sleep Apnea can lead to High blood pressure, heart disease, heart attack, stroke, obesity and diabetes.  As a side bar I’ve learned that even kids can have some form of sleep apnea.  Central Sleep Apnea is one that is caused in the brain, so I was thinking it might have something to do SIDS.

After about an hour and a half of just laying there I finally fell asleep.  Then I woke up.  Then fell asleep again. Then woke up.  Somewhere around 2:30am the tech came in my room and asked me if I wanted to try the CPAP mask.  It was a nasal pillow so it goes only over the nose and it was hard to breath with at first.  I felt like I was drowning.  And if you open your mouth then all this air rushes out and it is so annoying.  I did fall asleep but still woke up several times, even with the mask.  I finally gave up on the whole trying to sleep thing around 5am and woke up.

I told the Tech while he was unplugging me that I thought I was supposed to come back on a different day to use the machine and he tells me, “Yeah, well I didn’t want you to die on my shift.”  NICE!  Apparently he’s never seen anyone that stops breathing as often, and for as long as I do.  He said that even with the machine I would stop breathing at first and he kept having to raise the air pressure.   That, he said, was quite unusual.

So at this point I guess I don’t have to wait till I see the Dr. to know I have Sleep Apnea and will probably have to get one of those Machines.  Also, it’s nice to know that I’ll probably die in my sleep at some point in my life.  I guess if you gotta go,  going in your sleep is the way to go.