So I arrived at 8 p.m. as directed, and the waiting room was full of jolly, corpulent men noisily discussing their sleep apnea, and how you can buy either the $300 CPAP machine or the $800 CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine. Heavy people with excess soft tissue around their airways seem to be more prone to obstructive apnea, a condition where you routinely undergo nocturnal non-breathing episodes, usually causing you to snore and wake up suddenly with a snort. (Central sleep apnea, the other type, is when you stop breathing for lack of effort, as though you can't be bothered. That sounds more like me.)
All the seats being full, I waited off to one side, hoping desperately that I wouldn't be sharing a room with any of these chronic snorers. One guy would wave his arms while talking and chortling excitedly, causing his shoulder to press against the steel disk that activates the handicap electric doors — and so over and over again the doors swung open and closed for no one, in time to this fellow's effusions. Some were there for a return visit — which you're obliged to do if your first visit suggests you're a candidate for a CPAP machine. This filled me with dread — besides the cost, I wanted no part of living with a bedside machine, let alone a mask strapped over my face every night.After a while I was given a long form to fill out, asking whether I had twitchy legs (restless leg syndrome), etc. Then I waited again. Eventually orderlies began ushering groups of three and four into an inner area. One short, older guy seemed momentarily lost, staring around blank and confused as his wife bade him goodnight and left him there.
The relative calm was welcome, but then I was ushered down the same corridor with a couple of others. By now a few women had joined the 90% male group. We arrived at another waiting room, this one full of the same boisterous clients as I'd seen in the outer one, only now they were all guffawing at an episode of Survivor. I dragged a chair as far from the TV as possible and tried to read.
When my name was called again, an older Filipino woman led me down another corridor to a room with four dentists' chairs. I sat in one while she fussed around me for a good half hour, applying gels to parts of my head, chest and legs and then taping wires of various colors to those same spots. I found it strange having gel smeared on my hair, and Rosa spoke very little. Meanwhile, this same routine was happening to two or three other patients around the room. One guy was attended to by a very chatty gay orderly, making me happy enough that I'd wound up with laconic Rosa. No one else seemed to appreciate how weird the whole scene was.When Rosa was finished, I had multicolored plumes of wires sprouting Medusa-like from all over me, most of them terminating in a box. Soon, carrying my box, I followed Rosa back down the hall to a small room with (what a relief!) just one bed, and a common bathroom across the hall.
Rosa explained that she would be sitting in a room down the hall monitoring my heart rate, brainwaves, breathing, leg movements, what have you. I would also be observable on closed-circuit TV and audible via microphones. If I needed to go wee-wee during the night, I should just call out her name in the dark and she'd come and unhook me so I could carry my box into the men's room.
I dreaded having to express such abject infantile dependency — calling out something akin to mom...? mom...? in the darkness. So even though I was hardly bursting to go, I took the opportunity, prehookup, to carry my box — called a headbox — over to the urinals and do my level best.
By now it was nearly 11:30 — well over three hours since I'd arrived at the clinic, and well past my bedtime, given that next morning I would have to drive home across town, shower & eat, and then drive back across town to work. And as it happened, I did not have a good sleep at the sleep clinic.
Turning in bed with all those wires was not easy. And sure enough, a couple of hours into my uneasy slumber, I had to go. I felt ridiculous calling out "Rosa" in a dark room, waiting half a minute, and then calling "Rosa" louder. Then her nasal voice crackled over the intercom asking what I needed, and I had to explain my humble wants to a disembodied voice. Soon I was staggering toward the urinals again, dressed in a gown, clutching my headbox, and cursing my perverse bladder, which normally gets me through the night just fine, thank you.
Very rarely, too, do I wake up with a snort — perhaps once a year. Yet that night, even as I was dreading that they might determine I had sleep apnea, I woke up twice with a snort. Perhaps I was influenced by having listened to all those sleep-apnea sufferers in the waiting rooms, I don't know. But in the weeks since, recalling those snorts, I've wondered how I would fend them off (tell them to stuff their CPAPs?) if they concluded from my report that I needed another night at the clinic and then, likely, a machine. My father-in-law suggested that all I might need is a tennis ball taped to my back to keep me from sleeping supine — a folk remedy that seemed, frankly, to make about as much sense as a CPAP machine.However, yesterday my GP showed me my polysomnogram report, and I don't have sleep apnea — something I pretty much knew anyway. Nor hypopnea (partial obstructions lasting more than 10 seconds an episode). I do experience routine episodes, lasting less than 10 seconds, of sub-par breathing, but nothing, apparently, to be concerned about. Nothing was mentioned about restless-leg syndrome, either. It suggested I might suffer from mood disorders or anxiety, and concluded ... wait for it ... that I take sleeping pills. In fact, the same pills I've been taking.
