and things went downhill from there

I spent last night at the hospital undergoing a sleep study (though I was convinced that it was on Sunday, but fortunately I checked just before we left the house to head down there and noticed that I had written it down as "Sunday, March 14." After some checking, I discovered that it was the Sunday part that I had wrong.) atara has complained for some time that I snore and stop breathing during the night, and I admit that I've suffered symptoms that one associates with sleep apnoea. That said, I have not experienced the symptoms nearly as badly in recent months, though as atara has pointed out, part of that is because I have not been sleeping much anyway for them to manifest.

When I call it a "sleep" study, I could just as accurately call it a "sleepless" study. It is very difficult to fall asleep when you have probes wired all over your head and body, and you are lying on a slab in a noisy hospital. For the first part of the night, I think I would describe my experience as fitful dozing rather than true sleep, though I did manage to get some sleep later in the night after the nurse came in and hooked up a CPAP mask over my nose and ordered me to not breathe through my mouth (though I could make no promises of what would happen after I fell asleep).

She kept remotely adjusting the pressure over the rest of the night, so that sometimes it was barely pushing any air, and other times it was blasting so hard that it was actually a struggle to exhale.

When she first hooked me up to the machine, she asked me to lay on my back and try to sleep that way. At first I was too distracted by the constantly fluctuating pressure to be able to sleep, but eventually she left the settings alone long enough for me to doze off. When I did, I had a strange, very realistic dream of waking up again with morning daylight coming through the window, and the nurse coming in to the room and starting to unhook everything. To my surprise, I woke up to find myself still lying in the dark, alone, hooked up to machines. It was a very confusing moment.

The moment I awoke, the nurse barked at me over the intercom to roll over onto my side. I can't shake the feeling that she intentionally woke me up by shutting off the mask so that she could have me roll over to collect more data.

Needless to say, I am exhausted tonight, and I shall be heading directly to bed right after I post this.

I would make a witty comment about this picture, but my brain is fried. Have a blue frog.