Not pictured: two "very special" sensors
It's weird that I can sleep all day and still want nothing more at 10:30 than to forsake this cursed blog and dive into the sheets. You think I would be well rested. The fact remains, I'm tired, and this post will be a bit rough.
Last night and all of today I subjected myself to a sleep study, the primary reason being that I'm under suspicion of having sleep apnea (a felony in MN). Being in a sleep study is not unlike being in a zoo: I have a very finite space and a seemingly infinite amount of time, people who I can't see stare at me, and if I'm a good boy they bring me jello.
Last night I checked in around 10 and had myself wired up by a jovial guy named Max, a former pro indoor soccer player for the Milwaulkee Wave. We bonded over the fact that I was a Cleveland Force fan back in my youth, and over the fact that soccer players score all the cute chicks. It takes about 30 minutes to completely wire me up (see photo above...sorry about the orientation, I'm too tired to care to figure out why it's not righting itself), so we covered Brett Favre, the super bowl, international politics, the grammies, papparazi, and just about most every other topic.
Then they leave you alone and tell you to go to sleep, which is the perfect way to ensure I will not sleep. Many other factors conspire to thwart my slumber - the wires, the pillows, the strange hospitally bangs and bumps in the night (I try not to think of Jamie Lee Curtis in 'Halloween') - but none moreso than the fact that I KNOW THEY'RE WATCHING ME! I can't see it because it's dark, but up by the ceiling is a night vision camera with an unblinking lens pointed right at me, and there's a control room where a former pro soccer player with huge thighs is drumming his fingers on a desk, wondering when I will finally just sleep already. It's stressing stuff.
I must have succeeded at some point, sleep had to have happened, because the thigh man is suddenly waking me up. Then begins the next phase of the study: nappy time.
The nap study is five consecutive cycles of an hour and a half awake followed by a 30 minute nap. I'm not a napper by nature, so I was really worried about being able to nap on command. What if I couldn't come through for them?
As it turns out, you don't really have to nap if you can't; you just lie there with your eyes closed, which is what I did the majority of the time. Since there's not much to do in such a situation, my mind lazily began to wonder what exactly all those sensors on my head were reading. How sensitive were they? Can they know what I'm thinking right now?? I was suddenly pretty sure that they were reading my thoughts. Just to test it, I decided to think really hard about something bad and see if they came in to arrest me. Nothing terrible. I opt for a bank robbery. I spend the next 5 minutes concentrating on robbing a bank, trying to visualize me in the lobby with a ski mask on, telling people to lie down, the whole cliched procedure.
After I wait a while, my door does not open and they do not arrest me.
Still, those things have to sense something, right? I'm not dismayed. This time I decide to think about sex once a minute for the entire duration of the nap. This is not a stretch for me or any guy. My logic is that there has to be some sort of strange blip on a graph that occurs if I think of something naughty, and I could blow their minds by making it happen at precisely regular intervals. Brilliant!
I'm not sure if I got past 2 times. Counting to 60 is hard to do three times in a row, so I lost track and got bored and just laid there, thinking about neither sex nor bank robberies.
In my wakeful times, I could do pretty much whatever, including roam the hospital. I tried this early on, but was amazed at a) how busy the hospital was, b) how many cute doctors work there, c) how ridiculous I looked with all that crap pasted to my head (people were literally staring at me. I guess I would too if I saw something like that picture above), and d) how boring a hospital is when you've got no agenda other than just wandering.
So leisurely constitutionals around the halls were effectively out, meaning I was confined to my quarters. I read a bit. I watched the news 4 times. The night before, I had searched the house in vain for any viable reading material that I could bring with me, and came up empty. Jen called around midday to tell me that two National Geographics AND a Discover magazine had come today. Super timing.
Having done one, I can't say that I'd recommend a sleep study. Maybe you need one, and in that case I say it's up to you. But be warned, they're not a lot of fun; certainly less fun than robbing banks.
Day three hundred and fifty two. (13....13 days, aaaahh ah ah ah ahhhhh) (that was The Count)
Random girly girl shots
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