How love drove me East of Eden toward the Land of Nod, Part 2: Feeling wired

Posted 2/24/16

A patient prepped and ready for a sleep survey. by Hugh Gilmore Last week: My loud nighttime snoring drove my wife and me to sleeping in separate rooms. That was not a happy situation, and it ruined …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

How love drove me East of Eden toward the Land of Nod, Part 2: Feeling wired

Posted
A patient prepped and ready for a sleep survey. A patient prepped and ready for a sleep survey.

by Hugh Gilmore

Last week: My loud nighttime snoring drove my wife and me to sleeping in separate rooms. That was not a happy situation, and it ruined the quality of our sleep. I vowed to “do something about it” by the end of 2014. My ENT doctor suggested I submit to a sleep study and wrote me an order for it. Having procrastinated all year, I made an appointment for Dec. 23. Just under the wire.

If your doctor writes you an order for a sleep study, depending on your insurance and whether you feel comfortable sleeping among strangers, you can choose to do the study at home (with rented equipment) or at a specialized sleep medicine center. I chose the latter, not trusting any self-administered health test.

Sleep clinics have sprung up throughout the United States in the past 10 years as a lucrative (I don’t mean that negatively) side industry. In choosing one, however, I felt anxious about letting myself be manipulated while I slept by non-medical personnel, in a place that was not a medical facility. So I went to the Center for Sleep Medicine at Chestnut Hill Hospital. As far as I can tell, it seems to be a state-of-the-art facility. Nonetheless, an air of mystery surrounds going away overnight when little specific detail about the “procedure” is offered.

“Report to the Emergency Room at 8 p.m.,” I was told. I did, walking into the neon gloom of what looks like an airport departure room, punctuated by the sounds of children with hacking coughs and feverish, weary looking people. My reason for being there felt bogus and silly compared to the very real misery others were enduring.

At the desk I said, “I’m here for a sleep study.”

“Okay, take a seat. Somebody will call your name.”

I sat. After a half hour I heard my name called. It was to check in at one of the side windows where your ID and insurance are confirmed. After that: “Take a seat. Someone will come down for you.” Everyone was polite and professional, but uncertainty creates in me the kind of tension where I feel no one knows or cares that I am there. After about 15 minutes, a security guard came and guided me through the labyrinthian, dark hallways of the main hospital after hours.

We emerged from an elevator into a quiet, carpeted, hallway that resembled a mid-priced hotel. There I met a young uniformed woman I’ll call Sheila, my sleep technician. No “medical” persons were around. She guided me to my room, an old hospital room pleasantly made over to look like a hotel room. Not so bad, I thought, I’d expected painted cinder-block thrift. The room and wing were very quiet. Relaxing. Perhaps sleep-inducing?

It was 9 p.m. by then. Sheila asked me to fill out some forms, please, then relax. She’d return in a while and get started. I tried reading. I tried eating some of the snacks I’d brought. Mostly I waited, wondering what would happen next.

Around 9:30 Sheila returned. She attached wires and electrodes to my hands, arms, legs, chest, neck, shoulders and back. Then I was led over to a room where more wires were fixed to my head and face. Then back to the room. Nothing about the procedure is uncomfortable except for what happens in one’s mind the second the leads are connected to the monitoring machine. Instantly, I feared I’d need to go to the bathroom. Relax, I told myself. New to me, but old hat to the technicians who work here every night. They see just about every type of insomnia and apnea sufferer.

Sheila turned the lights out. I lay in the dark thinking how weird it was to be less than a mile from home, lying like the meatball in a spaghetti of wires. The silence suddenly changed when, from a speaker in the wall near my head, I heard Sheila say, “Okay, Hugh, let’s make sure everything’s working. Lift your right hand. Good. Now your left. Okay, your right foot. Your left. Okay. Look to the right. Look to the left. Blink.” So, all my points of attachment were affirmed. But it’s the strangest feeling to know one’s every move is being monitored, as though a pair of eyes were penetrating the darkness and watching my slightest move.

(And yes, later on I spoke trustingly into the inky darkness, “Sheila, I need the bathroom, please.” A minute later she came in and turned on the lights and unhooked my main plug. I shuffled to the bathroom with my wires collection draped over my arm. Then returned. Then was plugged back in and left in darkness again.

Over my years of sleep failure I had become addicted to Ambien, gradually progressing from half a 10 mg tab to two full tabs a night in order to fall asleep and more or less stay there for six hours or so. At such a dosage, I felt sluggish in the morning. Awakening was comparable to swimming up from the lower depths of a murky pool. I considered that feeling normal, though, and accepted it as the price of aging. Thus I took my meds and began my version of sleep-clinic sleeping.

At 6:30 a.m. Sheila woke me up, though I, per usual, did not feel I’d been to sleep yet. It was time to go home. She would not answer any questions, like: Did I snore? In the morning darkness of Christmas Eve I walked out to the nearly empty parking lot and drove home. Once there, I slipped under the quilt on the sofa and tried to sleep, still in the dark, alone once again – against my will. My appointment to discuss the results was scheduled for Jan. 9. Was help on the way? (To be continued)

Hugh Gilmore is the author of several books published by Amazon in both print and e-book formats. Most recently, his memoir, “My Three Suicides: A Success Story,” has remained in the Kindle Top-100 in its categories for almost a year.

enemies-of-reading