::: dahlbergcentral.com ::: i don't need to pee pee, i just need to rock

So I went in for a sleep study last night, because I snore like a rusty chainsaw cutting through five layers of steel and aluminum sitting on top of a bag of exploding firecrackers.

"Sleep study", as used here, is of course a euphemism for "medieval torture re-enactment".

Arrive at the hospital at 7:00. Check in, find the clinic, get set in a room. My attendant, Neal, says to make myself comfortable, watch some TV, he's getting his other guy "wired up" and he'll be back for me in an hour or so. The phrase "wired up" does not instill me with either comfort or confidence. Neal says that there's movies on channel 21, but sometimes you could get stuck with something like ON GOLDEN POND, which apparently is bad. I settle for LAW & ORDER reruns on TNT.

After a bit, Neal comes back and takes me back to "get wired". Neal measures my head with a tape measure, makes marks on my skull with a grease pencil for the electrodes. I'm convinced he's trying to poke through to my brain, like one of those bizarre psych experiments where the doc makes the patient make strange sounds and speak different languages by jabbing his cerebellum with giant metal spikes.

Wires, wires everywhere. I'm holding a cable that runs down my shirt, through my shorts and down each leg. Neal's swabbing (ha! "abrading") my skin with a solution that will allow better contact and conductivity for the electrodes, all the better for the techs to find out what's going on in my head at night. He jabs me in the side with one of the swabs, follows it up with a piece of gauze soaked in the glue solution. I manage not to scream, but it's a close call.

Back to the room and more TV. Neal's got to put his other guy to bed, so I sit back down on the chair and watch some more L&O, only this time I've got wires attached to my head and a circuit box with about thirty different leads on a cord draped around my neck. When Sam Waterston wins his big case, I turn off the tube, get my book out and read for a while, only to catch myself dozing over the pages. Not even Soderbergh's Palme D'Or freakout can keep me awake, it seems. A disembodied voice from the speaker: the camera's been turned on, just so I know. I resist the immediate urge to look up and give it the finger.

Time for bed. Neal starts plugging things in to the wall. I get a couple more things -- belts around my chest, to measure rise and fall, I guess; a finger pulse monitor (damn thing beeps like an alarm clock if it gets dislodged, a fact I find out to my great dismay sometime around three in the morning); and what looks like a stripped piece of speaker wire shoved up my nostrils. "Heat sensitive," Neal says. "Measures your breath. The lower piece will catch you if you open your mouth to breathe in the middle of the night." And indeed, there's a little piece of wire hanging down below my bottom lip, scratching my jaw ever so slightly.

Sleep on your back? Neal asks. Nope. Well, I'm gonna need at least an hour or so of you on your back sometime during the night, he says. Can I sleep on my side? Yeah, that shouldn't be too much of a problem. I lean over to try it out, but with wires running everywhere, getting comfortable on my side with a hospital pillow isn't exactly in the cards. On my back it is, I guess.

Lights out, Neal disappears only to return via the intercom. We do some calibrations for the sensors -- move my eyes left, right, up, down; blink; flex my legs; snore. I think I won't be able to relax, but it's not long before I drift off to sleep.

Weird dreams: in one, Neal comes in shouting like R. Lee Ermey, rousing me from "deep sleep" to see just how fast I can come out of it. There's another guy there, who I guess is one of the other patients, but he's got no gear on, so I can't tell. I'm standing at attention with wires dangling from my head like braids, bare feet on cold tile (which of course it isn't, because the entire suite and hallway are carpeted, presumably to cut down on noise.) Then the whole thing shifts and I'm in a glassed-in emergency room, and there's a midget doctor, who says something, looks very happy with himself, and then walks off down the hall. I follow him into the parking lot, where he climbs into the trunk of an old sedan, turns around and falls over like he's had a heart attack. A paramedic comes running over, and I'm all freaked out that this guy just keeled over in the trunk, but there's a woman telling the medic to be careful, and then the midget jumps up, clubs the medic over the head, makes a smart remark about revenge, and then jumps out of the trunk and goes back into the hospital.

It's at this point that the fingerpulsemonitoralarmclock thingy starts beeping like mad.

...

Neal wakes me up at 6:00. When he comes in, he tells me that he feels sorry for my wife, then pours what feels like a gallon of acetone on the electrodes to dissolve the glue. I'm almost gagging from the smell (for reference: take a rag and drench it in fingernail polish remover. Hold it in front of your face. Inhale deeply.) Conditioner gets it out best, Neal says, but three hours later I'm still finding little bits of undissolved gunk in my hair. We'll let you know, he tells me -- but I've got a feeling you'll be back.

Great, I say. Can't wait.

posted by Gus at 9:45 AM | |