Assorted
I’ve come down with a cold. I’m really out of practice with being sick. Once upon a time I’d get a cold every four to six weeks, so it was really no biggie. Since I started working at the library though, I don’t seem to get as sick as often. I’m thinking that it’s because I’m exposed to so much, so often there, that it keeps my immune system in tune.
Anyway, since I got home from the sleep center on Friday, used Kleenex have begun piling up, I’m in perpetual brain-fog and boy, am I ever sleeping a lot.
Thursday night at the sleep center, the RN with the study stayed late to talk with me when I arrived. We got everything all settled. What was most helpful was that by then, my program had kicked-in.
I had tied my reaction to an emotion: Fear. Fear that I’d be booted from the program and fear that they would see me as a liar with respect to my sobriety and by extension, with respect to the sleep diary and the symptoms I reported.
I had tied my reaction one of the seven deadlies: Pride. Turns out, I take greater pride in my sobriety than I thought. I bit too much as it happens. I also take too much pride in my “rigorous honesty”—one of the core tenents of the program. It felt like a personal attack on my honesty and sobriety.
It wasn’t, of course. One of the things the RN told me was, “I knew it was a false-positive. It couldn’t have been anything else. But that didn’t change that I had to go through the whole process, including asking those questions.”
To which she added, “I thought your reaction was a bit unusual.” Peculiar is the word I’d use.
I tied my reaction to the steps, particularly four and six. Taking a personal inventory in four, I found that I still have trust issues based on past credibility issues. It’s one of the things I feel realy bad about and project my own feelings on to others. Taking that to step six, I’m asking for help in dealing with that character defect.
Anyway, Thursday night went much better. Shortly after ten, an adorable little twinky of a tech tucked me in and except for getting up once to pee, I slept well through the night.
The shift changes at one, and I asked the overnight tech what she thought of my PSG. She hadn’t “scored” it yet—there was the business to removing electrodes and breakfast to attend to first—but she said it looked pretty good.
I asked specifically about intrusions of alpha waves and she replied that yes, there were those. Alpha wave intrusions are characteristic of fibromyalgia. Alpha waves, btw, are associated with being awake, so when you have alpha waves while sleeping, it’s not a good thing.
This second night, I had an almost completely different set of locations for my electrodes. I think around eight were in the same places as the night before, and there are 32 in total. I had enough of them across my eyebrows that it almost qualified as a wax job. The cute twinky tech and I tried to figure out what the opposite of “furrow” as in “furrow your brow” would be. The closest we could come was “unfurrow”, which wasn’t really satisfying, but good for a few laughs during calibration.
Calibration was interesting. There were the things you would expect, like wiggling your toes to check the leg electrodes. But there were things I didn’t expect, like mentally repeating the number one and mentally counting backwards from 100 by threes. Both of these done with eyes open and closed.
The counting backwards by threes thing was a challenge since I couldn’t do it by rote and had to perfom the subtraction each time. And subtraction isn’t my strong suit. Each night I’d made it down to 85 and 82 with eyes open. Since I could remember those for a few moments, I did better with eyes closed, making it down to 67 on the second night.
And on that second night, when told to purse my lips like I was blowing a kiss, I did just that. Blew a kiss to the camera. The twinky tech laughed.
Not including the trauma I caused myself over the false-positive on the drug test, the worst thing about the whole process was what it did to my hair.
I wrote a while back about how I kept catching my hair in the band of the physical activity monitor in the shower. In three weeks I never got any better with that. Preparation for the overnight tests was murder.
You’re supposed to arrive freshly showered and are not allowed to use any skin, body or hair conditioners. Eeek! No hair conditioner? It took me over 20 minutes to comb out the tangles. I was nearly in tears from hearing all the snapping and breaking. The resulting hairball I’ve pretty much wiped from my memory.
On the second night, I considered not combing-out at all, until I saw that I basically had a dreads thing going that really shouldn’t be encouraged. Once dreads happen, scissors are the only way to remove them. Not an option. I mean I have nothing against dreads on other people, but on a bald, middle-aged white guy, it’s probably not the best look.
Mornings were not better considering the electrodes are glued to your head, sometimes with some extra tape added for good measure. So in the mornings when I could use conditioner, I had to deal with glue. It was not pretty.
On the other hand, there’s a new guy at the Friday meeting who’s terribly cute and has a nice little starter ponytail going. And he’s a hairdresser. I’ll be making an appointment this week to have my ends done. I can’t see going all the way to Toronto to see Louise Marie, since (thinking positively here) if I’m accepted in the study, I’ll have to repeat the nights in the lab after eight weeks of treatment.
Something that really suprised me was how little the electrodes bothered me. That was the case for all but one of the other particpants. I usually sleep on my side or on my belly, with my head turned aside. I figured the electodes on my temples, next to my eyes and behind my cheekbones and ears would be an irritating problem. Not at all.
The only things that bothered me was the oxygen sensor on my finger the first night and the fear of getting tangled in my wires. I was just hyper-aware of the wires. No actual tangling (or discomfort) occurred.
On the plus side, my resting EKG, also part of the screening process, is marvelous. Even given some noise in v6, which both the tech and the RN said they could “see through”, they said it looked great.
And here’s someting interesting. I had to wear the physical activity monitor on non-dominant (left) wrist. I tried wearing my watch there too, but they clapped together loudly, which was annoying, and I was afraid it would damage the gold plating on my watch.
Wearing my watch on the right, well, was an exercise in futility. I discovered I could not tell time. I’d look at the thing and it just didn’t seem to be right. It took me almost the whole of the three weeks to figure out why.
My brain wanted to read it as a mirror-image. I finally figured out that didn’t have much problem at noon and six. But three in the afternoon was completely disorienting. I’d get almost seasick looking at it in the afternoon. How very strange.
And finally, there’s mouse in the house. Around four this morning congestion needed serious clearing and I was up alternately reading and blowing my nose, when movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. A few moments later a little brown house mouse peeked out from under my main PC.
There’s not much I can do about it now, other than to make sure food, food particles and the piles of Kleenex are picked up.
