Unfortunately, it turns out I am one of those rare people for whom the CPAP made zero impact. The sleep tech woke me up a little while ago and said, “You were a tough one.”
Apparently it took forever for me to fall asleep (I had to tell the tech that was typical for me) and once asleep, I kept waking up even when the tech increased the pressure going through the CPAP.
I asked, rather fearfully, if they were going to leave it to my primary care doc to “read this off the report” once it was completed in 3 weeks, and the very nice tech said she’d email her boss to see if the boss could suggest something else for me or set up an appointment with one of their sleep doctors, since my own doc seems to have no idea this was even possible.
All I want is just one freaking full night of sleep. At this point, I’d settle for 3 continuous, non-medicated hours.
The sleep lab unexpectedly got a cancellation, so here I am for my second study. Same electrode hookup, but this time I have to also wear a CPAP — a nosepiece attached to a headband, with a tube connecting to a box that’ll force air into my nose. It’s like the headgear Joan Cusack had in Better Off Dead, and equally charming.
Tonight’s room has a lovely bedside stand I can use for my bottle of water, my book, and my glasses, unlike the chair I had to use last time. But no new issue of People Magazine, sadly. I don’t know if you can tell over the Interwebs, but I’m crying a little bit about this. Damn it, I need to know why the Bachelorette broke the rules!*
I’m across from the nurses’ station, which means I can hear the other sleep study patient’s snoring through the loudspeaker the nurse is monitoring. My diagnosis — the dude is on his first study, needs to lose weight, and has sleep apnea. I wonder if the nurse will be annoyed if I explain my diagnosis to her on my way to the bathroom?
*No, I don’t know what rules the Bachelorette broke. But I saw the cover of the latest issue of People, and now the only thing I can think about is why she broke them!
I was peeling an orange in my boss’s kitchen today during a break at work, when I noticed him.
Li’l G had suddenly, quietly, appeared at the other end of the kitchen. His gaze went immediately to the orange in my hand, and then his eyes moved back up to meet my eyes. He grinned, engagingly, at me. He started walking toward me, head tilted, maintaining eye contact the whole time.
(Did I mention that Gus learned to walk last week? And already he’s finding it so incredibly useful…just wait until you have to be on your feet for 10+ hours a day, kid, and you’ll be wishing you’d stuck with crawling.)
I finished peeling my orange and ran out of the kitchen through the other door. Gus backed out of the kitchen through his door and intercepted me at the dining table. He stood still, a few feet away from me, and smiled again. He looked meaningfully at my orange.
Thankfully, my boss’s mother-in-law, who was babysitting that day, caught sight of what was going on, and got some Chex mix for Gus. Otherwise I would have eventually succumbed to the Paco-like gaze of Gus, and fed him some pieces of orange out of sheer guilt. And just like Paco, Gus would have ended up with strange, wiggly orange segments in his poop, inevitably resulting in a conversation between his parents that would go something like this:
“What the fuck is this kid eating!”
“I don’t know! He has teeth now; why isn’t he using them?”
“Jesus! Whatever it is, don’t give it to him again!”
“At least it’s not corn!”
My landlady, her partner, the landlady’s daughter, the partner’s two (or three?) kids are all going on vacation today.
I know this because:
- My landlady told me.
- There have apparently been herds of elephants stampeding up and down the stairs for an hour last night, and two hours so far this morning.
Though lately I’ve had a lot more exposure to children (not that kind), I’m still always amazed to realize how heavy young children really are. Small, slender children, who look like they weigh as much as a toothpick, actually contain incredibly dense bodies capable of producing an unbelievable amount of noise as they walk.
I remember once hefting a friend’s child. He was four years old at the time. And yes, he was an unusually tall and strong four. But I’m 36. Should I really have toppled over when I started lifting him?
Maybe there’s some kind of secret that these kids aren’t telling the adults. They’re carrying invisible boulders in their pockets. I’m sure that’s it.
Stanley had his dental appointment today and appears to have come out of it fine. I went to the vet’s office right after work to see him, and also to pay the bill.
(A brief aside: I offered to pay the bill so Stanley could get his teeth done earlier, because Chris said otherwise he would have to put off getting it done for financial reasons. Yes, the appointment was expensive — $388. But how is it that the guy who makes six figures, owns a 4500 square foot house, bought a new car last year, has five computers, two TiVos, two flatscreen/widescreen TVs, and two or three gaming systems, can’t pay this bill? I’m in a freaking one-bedroom apartment with my shitty old car, no alimony, and a part-time job that may or may not end in a few weeks. Yes, I know it’s just stuff. I know I’m better off on my own. I know the divorce is done and over with, and it’s useless to bitch and moan about what I lost. But damn it, I’m human and selfish, miserable and lonely, and sometimes I have to bitch and moan, because sometimes I can’t help but just want my old life back, with all of its STUFF. And now I am done bitching and moaning, so back to my post, stuff-less.)
I had to wait about 15 minutes to pay the bill because a lot of people were waiting to check in and out, and there was only one person working at the front desk. And after I paid the bill, the vet tech at the front wasn’t sure about whether I could see Stanley.
I’d called the vet’s office earlier in the day to make sure I could visit Stan even though Chris would be picking him up later, and I’d run the idea by Chris, so when the vet tech started to say, “Well, we don’t usually let anyone go back to see — ” I cut him right off.
“Can you please bring him out to me, then?” I asked, trying to be polite. “I haven’t seen my dog in four months.” I gave him the Look. The Look which said, “Dude, I am trying to be polite, and I am trying not to cry here, but I can feel a little prickle starting in my eyes, which tells me that if I do not get to see my dog in the next few minutes, I am totally going to HAVE HYSTERICS RIGHT HERE IN YOUR OFFICE AND YOU SEE THAT BIG DOG IN THE CORNER WAITING TO BE SEEN? THAT BIG DOG IS GOING TO BE TREMBLING IN FEAR BY THE TIME I AM DONE.”
The vet tech was evidently familiar with the Look, and he said, after a pause, “Sure, I can bring him out.”
I sat down in the waiting area to do what everyone does there: wait.
The vet tech brought out Stanley in his crate and placed the crate on the bench beside me. I opened the crate door. Stan crept out and onto my lap.
Truthfully, I’m not even sure Stanley remembered me. He didn’t wildly wag his tail or attempt to lick my nose, or do any of the other behaviors he normally does to demonstrate that yes, he knows me, and yes, he is ecstatic to see me. But he didn’t try to bite me, so I suppose part of him recognized me, and admittedly, he’d just had ten (!!) teeth removed so he wasn’t really operating at full speed.
I didn’t feel as bad as I thought I would, when Stan didn’t freak out immediately upon seeing me. I wasn’t sure what I felt either. It’d been so long since I’d seen any of the dogs that I almost couldn’t remember how to hold or pet him. So there we sat: me on the bench, tentatively stroking Stanley’s head, and Stanley shivering on my lap.
After about fifteen minutes, I took Stanley outside so he could pee and poop. He didn’t seem too interested in hanging around outside, so we returned to the waiting room. He got back on my lap and I patted him while I read a copy of People Magazine.
Eventually Stanley stopped shivering, and curled up comfortably while I read, occasionally popping his head up to look at any new dogs that walked into the room. After I finished the magazine, I sat with Stanley a while longer and then took him outside on a quick walk around the vet’s office.
By now I’d sat with him for an hour and I had to get going, because I didn’t want to run into Chris picking Stan up. I put Stanley back into his crate and waited to catch the vet tech’s eye.
“I’m all set now,” I said.
A different vet tech came out to get Stanley’s crate, and that’s when my eyes started twitching and my throat closed up. I’d done well up until then, but now that I had to say goodbye, I was beginning to cry. So I whispered, “Thank you,” to the vet tech, because even in severe emotional distress, I still can’t help being polite, and I patted Stanley one last time through the bars of his crate door.
And then I walked outside and sat in my car, and cried.
I put this together months ago (at the end of December) and then forgot about it. So here it is. You won’t have to sign up for anything to play the links unless you exceed the number of free plays, but you will need to click on the play button (and accept pop-ups for the Rhapsody links).
I’ve also posted a playlist below, which should theoretically play all the songs with one click of the play button. The version of Separate Lives it plays is different from the recorded version, and oddly, I Thought You Were My Boyfriend has a bunch of talking in the middle of it.
Your Heart is an Empty Room (Death Cab for Cutie)
‘Cause all you see is where else you could be
Loneliness is Worse (Veruca Salt)
Don’t you want to be happy with me
Hide and Seek (Imogen Heap)
Mmmm whatcha say,
Mmm that you only meant well?
well of course you did
Mmmm whatcha say,
Mmmm that it’s all for the best?
of course it is
Mmmm whatcha say?
Mmmm that it’s just what we need
you decided this
I thought you were my boyfriend (The Magnetic Fields)
I wish I could see you,
I wish I could sleep
Should I freak out?
Should I seek out
Someone I could keep?
Untouchable Face (Ani Difranco)
Y’know, I don’t look forward to seeing you again soon
You’ll look like a photograph of yourself taken from far far away
Pictures of You (The Cure)
If only I had thought of the right words I could have held on to your heart
If only I’d thought of the right words I wouldn’t be breaking apart
All my pictures of you
Divorce Song (Liz Phair)
And the license said you had to stick around until I was dead
But if you’re tired of looking at my face, I guess I already am
Losing Your Memory (R. Star)
Call all your friends, and tell them I’m never coming back
Separate Lives (Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin)
You have no right to ask me how I feel
The Last Day of Our Acquaintance (Sinead O’Connor)
[Note: This starts out very quietly.]
I’ll talk but you won’t listen to me
I know your answer already
Home (Foo Fighters)
Wish I were with you, but I couldn’t stay
Every direction leads me away
Nothing Better (The Postal Service)
But you’ve had your chance so say goodbye
“I came by to water your plants today. I can’t tell what’s going on outside in the garden and which ones are plants and which are weeds, so I just watered everything. Also, I think one of your plants in the living room is growing tumors.”
When I did a sleep study almost a month ago, I figured it wouldn’t really turn up anything useful. Most sleep studies seem to only diagnose people who have sleep apnea (or restless leg syndrome), and though my father has sleep apnea, I don’t fall asleep every time I sit down the way my father used to, and I don’t snore. My problem, I thought, was that I simply could not fall asleep.
So I was surprised when my primary care physician’s secretary finally called me back with my sleep study results and said I had a “moderately abnormal” result for sleep apnea and that the doctor wanted me to make an appointment to go over the results with her.
Having been trained by my mother, who works in medical records, to always ask for a copy of any medical test results, I asked them to mail me a copy. Upon receiving the copy, I discovered that I have something called hypopnea. With regular apnea, you stop breathing for short periods of time. With hypopnea, you go through periods of very shallow breathing which leads to, as the report states, “poor sleep efficiency.” (And here I’d always thought I was very efficient!)
My sleep efficiency is 53%. Which means that of the time I spend in bed, they calculate I spend only about 53% of that time actually sleeping, and wake up approximately 15.6 times an hour. No wonder I’m exhausted every day.
My appointment with my PCP today consisted of me paying $20 to find out that 1) I have moderately abnormal results and 2) the next step is to do another sleep study for a CPAP fitting. Both of these things I had already known, and she didn’t seem to know much else about the study or how to interpret the results.
So that was $20 that could have been better spent on, oh, my Internet service, which is what I’m now using to find information on this topic.
In mid-June, I saw my landlady as I was heading out of my apartment and stopped to let her know I had decided to renew my lease. We got sidetracked into talking about random other things, and at one point during our conversation, she interrupted me to say, “You know, I can hardly believe you’re the same person who showed up at my door nearly a year ago, looking for an apartment. You carry yourself differently, you speak with so much more confidence, and you dress very differently — ”
(And here she stopped very quickly to assure me she didn’t mean I had dressed badly before, but I understood what she meant, and gave all the credit to my friend Eileen who, during the past year, had instructed me in the importance of buying clothes that actually fit.)
I was deeply touched to hear this from my landlady, because it confirmed what I’d been feeling; that the last year has been good for me, even while it was simultaneously the worst year of my life. And what she said was especially nice to hear because July was just around the corner.
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“As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”
– Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
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