Sleep Study

The most vivid memory of my sleep study last week is when the red headed technician came breathlessly into my room in the pre-dawn pitch darkness and softly said “Good Morning”. Even at that uncivilized hour I maintained civility and fumbled a forced unfazed reply. It was odd, knowing that she’d been sitting in the other room all night, watching me on camera, listening to me breathe, counting my heart beats, measuring how high my belly rose and god knows what else. This was the end of her shift. She spoke in the same dulcet tones she’d used last night. Even though I knew they were scripted, they were calming nonetheless. She stepped back into her observation room and spoke to me through a speaker right next to my head



“Look up. Look down. Blink your eyes five times.”



Then she came in came back in and began unhooking me from the monitors I had been attached to all night. I’d had the presence of mind to grab my cell phone, drag my ponytail of wires into the bathroom, and snap a picture of myself in the neon light. There were sensors stuck all over my head, under my nose, to my eyes, to my temples and cheeks. My hair was globbed with glue-like stuff now solidified into exquisite clumps. The brochure had said that I would have the option of showering before I left, and that was what I had planned to do. However, faced with the actual facility where such a shower would have occurred I opted not to. It didn’t really have the look of an amenity to be used for anything other than cleaning up after an accident.



I live a half a mile away from the hospital and figured I could make it home with just enough time to clean up and dress before driving to work. I stepped out into the dawn, be-clotted hair, wearing an amalgam of work clothes and pajamas; grey sweat pants and wing tips. It was damn early. Early, like when I had gone to work at the chicken ranch in Southern California at age fifteen and a half. I know for a fact that that's how old I was because I’d just gotten my learner’s permit and I remember that my dad had let me drive out Victoria Avenue in the darkness, my friends watching in sleepy awe from the back seat. For a moment I was triumphant, but in my reverie I overlooked a red light. Dad got mad, and made me pull over and relinquish the driver’s seat. I still get a twinge of embarrassment thinking of it.



I don’t usually come to this hospital, but it occupies a significant place in my life. In 1923 my mom was born here.Here, five years ago, my wife was diagnosed with lung cancer. In the early Eighties I’d come here for treatment of chronic debilitating headaches and during those same years saw a dermatologist for treatment of a basal cell carcinoma. But ominous news notwithstanding there was something I liked about the way the building perched on the edge of the massive arboretum across the street, just on the edge of urbanity. The trees were authoritatively silhouetted on the horizon and the low clouds were veined with crimson.



When i tell people about it they're amazed that I was able to sleep last night attached to all those wires. But in an odd way, the wires had actually helped me fall asleep, limiting possibilities of posture and movement. My phone, my book and my glasses on my left, a standby sleep apnea mask and TV remote on a bedside table on my right, I had dozed off midway through Letterman. I awoke a couple of times during the night, wished I wasn’t there, and then faded away before I could think too much about it. As I climbed into my car I realized that I hadn’t remembered to ask the technician about my rapid eye movement, although I’m not really sure what I would have asked.



I made it to work, presentable. The pasty stuff used to secure electrodes took about a week to finally wash off. I have another sleep study scheduled in June. In some grim way I look forward to another wiry embrace.