My relationship to sleep has always been fraught. On good days, I would wake up and brightly ask, “Oh, what fresh new hell does this day have in store for me?” On bad days, I would wake up and darkly ask, “Blaaargh arrgle rowf rowf ugh!”
I muddled through, as we all do.
Until one day when my cardiologist said, “You know, not being able to sleep puts stress on your heart.” When I blinked at him, he added: “That’s not good.” (In my defence, I would have come to that conclusion on my own if he had just given me a little more time.) Before I could say anything, the heart specialist had booked an appointment for me to get tested at a sleep clinic.
I had heard about proactive medical intervention, but I never thought it would happen to me!
The test involved being hooked up to a machine at various (highly uninteresting) parts of my body and sleeping. First, a green goo that looked suspiciously like a certain nasal effluent was slathered all over the place where an electrode would be taped to my body (I was told that it dried the skin, making it easier to tape the electrode to my body, and it served as a disinfectant, which, frankly, was more information than I needed – what? You thought I was an infection fetishist?). Nobody mentioned that the green goo itched like crazy, but, then, nobody would, would they?
Then, an electrode was taped to my body. (What? You thought I was a green goo fetishist? That’s just sick!)
There were over 20, so it took roughly half an hour to get fully hooked up; I have a lot more respect for actors who perform in heavy makeup and/or do motion capture now!
Adjacent to the sleeping area (think James Duvall’s room in THX 1138, but without the cat poster fridge magnet or charm) was a bathroom which included a shower that I was to use to get all of the green goo off my body before I went home. The shower may have succeeded in degooifying me, too, but my hair still felt besnotted days later.
Portrait of the not so young artist as a cyborg. For once, I was ahead of the technological curve! Kevin Kelly and Nicholas Negroponte eat your hearts out – this is what it means to be truly wired! And, the best part? Ads for Johnny Depp’s concurrent film Transcendence showed the actor with wires coming out of his head, too – we’re practically twins!
There were some problems with the procedure. For one thing, I usually go to sleep at three or four in the morning and wake up at noon, but, for this test, I had to go to sleep at ten in the evening and wake up at five in the morning. How uncivilized! For another thing, some of the wires were connected to my chest (to monitor my lungs and heart – kind of important, as it turned out), so I was advised not to sleep on my stomach in order not to disrupt the connections. Unfortunately, I only sleep on my stomach (and, I sort of kind of did during the test…a little, even though I was told not to – I’m such a rebel!). As a result, my evening in the clinic was made up mostly of tossing and turning and very unrestful sleep.
It figures. Only I could manage to fail a sleep test!
The whole experience was surreal. I had a dream that I was sitting at the table in my kitchen, aware that I was having a dream while sleeping in a strange bed. I kept repeating over and over again: “Let this be real! Let this be real! Let this be real!” And, that was the night. One moment, I was tossing and turning, the next having a dream, the next being woken up. I don’t actually have any sense of, you know, sleeping. (In fact, I probably slept more on the bus ride home than I did in the sleep clinic.) I must have slept, though, because I was told that I had been out long enough for a diagnosis to be made.
I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. Yay for medical certainty! But…yay for medical certainty?
What the hell is sleep apnea?