Last night I finally went to my sleep study. I'm going to do my best to go through the thing clearly so anyone who finds their way here searching for "sleep study" will understand exactly what they're getting into.
First of all, this week I got a packet in the mail that had a bunch of forms and surveys that I had to fill out and give to the tech when I got there. They asked questions like how many alcoholic beverages do I drink per week, how many cafinated drinks, how much exercise, what time do I typically go to bed and when do I wake up, all that stuff. Then it asked more subjective questions like how rested do you feel when you wake up in the morning and how would you rate a typical night's sleep. It took me a good half hour to go through and fill everything out, but it was simple.
One of the pages told me what to expect and what to bring along with me to the center. It basically said that I would be sleeping with sensors on me similar to an EKG and that someone would be monitoring a video and audio feed from my bedroom. It told me to wear comfortable clothes, bring whatever I wanted to sleep in and a pillow if that would help. The last thing on the sheet which I didn't realize was there until about 30 minutes from when I had to leave was that you have to take a shower before going in to make sure that all the stuff sticks to your head.
So I hopped in the shower, cleaned up, put on some easy to sleep in clothes, and was off. The center is only 5 minutes from my apartment and according to signs all over the place it's the number 1 sleep center in America. I guess I chose the right place. I parked accross the street and walked in.
My tech's name was Brian. He was an older gentleman and was very nice. He gave me a few more pieces of paper to fill out including one that said I wasn't going to sue anybody and that I would pay for their services. The one that actually had to do with sleep was funny. It asked me about all the drugs and booze I've put down in the past 8 hours. Then it asked me how I was feeling at that second. "How tired are you now? []A little []Very []Extremely" "How sleepy do you feel right now?" That kind of stuff.
Once my paperwork was in order I had to go sit in a little room and watch a 10 minute video on sleep studies. It was actually an infomertial from one of the CPAP makers, but the first half was a fake case study involving a dude that had sleep apnea and the stuff he was dealing with before and after the study. They showed one scene that hit home. The VO said something like, "Steve could fall asleep doing anything" and the video showed him dozing off during a card game. "His friends allways find it funny when he starts snoring, but it's not so funny to Steve." At this point everyone starts laughing and pointing out to the dude that he was snoring and he's just sitting there looking around going "I'm not sleeping" and one guy says, "I thought you only did that in board meetings" as they all laugh. I can't even tell you how many times shit like that has happened to me. If this ends up being the end of my sleepiness... but I digress. So the video goes on to show Steve doing a sleep study and then being fitted for a CPAP mask. The mask is a little triangle looking thing that goes over your nose and maintains pressure in your airway so it doesn't close off while you're sleeping. The last scene we watched was Steve outside clipping the bushes and he says some shit like, "Now I have the energy to do yardwork... take walks... have fun. I have the energy to enjoy my life and didn't even realize how much I was missing out on just because of sleep apnea." I want the energy to enjoy my life. That's why I did all this.
The video ends and Brian comes back in to get me. I go back in my room and he tells me to chill out for about a half hour and he'd be back in to wire me up so I could go to bed. At this point I sneak into the bathroom with my cell phone to make a call that I was really looking forward to making but realized I probably wasn't allowed to seeing as there was a big sign "NO CELLULAR PHONES!" I also snapped a few pictures at this stage of the evening:
This is the bed with hanging mic and straps that look like they are going to tie me down. You can see the clinical CPAP on the left of the night stand and the inputs for the wires on the right. As it turns out, those straps went around my chest and stomach and had sensors on them as well. I guess a lot of big dudes have sleep problems because I have quite a large torso and there was a ton of slack in the straps that had to be tightened out.
Here's a better picture of the tech gear next to the bed. The home CPAPs are smaller than this one, but this one is a clinical one that is used to monitor the effectiveness of the treatment while it's going on, so it's much different.
Here's the video camera that watched me all night and the speaker that Brian talked to me through while he was calibrating the equipment. We'll get to that soon.
Now I was left with a half hour to just chill out and watch TV. I put on some bullshit on the TV and nervously waited for Brian to come back. When he did he had me sit in a chair and started putting this goop in my hair and on my face that was used as a conductor between my skin and the sensors. The way he explained it was that the body puts out signals that are very very weak and this stuff is there to make them as clear as possible. His job throughout the night was to watch and make sure that the signals were as clear as possible. The reason you shower and he takes such care with the conductor goop is that any static in the signal, even if it's small, will be amplified right along with the good signals and make it hard to read. He said that even if I sweat he has ways to clear up the signal through the computers by changing things around digitally. His job sounds quiet, but pretty cool.
After about 10 minutes he was done sticking little metal things to my head, face, chest, and stomach. Here's how I looked:
It looks a lot more uncomfortable than it really was. The little metal wires didn't interfere with sleep at all. It just felt like I had tape on my head.
There's a shot of all the wires dangling off my dome piece.
Finally, it's sleep time. Brian has me lay in bed and hooks the two straps over my chest and starts plugging the wires that are dangling off my head into a little box that hangs off of the headboard of the bed. I have to say, the bed and the room were super comfortable. I couldn't have asked for a better place to sleep. I just hope that the comfort didn't make my sleep study look like nothing was wrong. It took a little while to get the wires right. One of the wires checks temperature and co2 output from my nose. It goes behind both of my ears and across my face, under my nose. It didn't go IN my nose, but the little prongs were just about touching it. That sensor was bad, so Brian had to come back in after testing out the system and replace it. It seriously looked like a piece of white string and he told me it costs about $200. It's amazing how much all this high tech shit costs.
Second one didn't work either. As it turns out I was distracting Brian too much with all my questions and he had plugged it in wrong.
Now I was wired up, under the sheets, lights off. Brian then came over the speaker and asked me to look around the room. He laughed and said my eyes were going all over the place allready. I have active eyes. I had to look up, down, left, right then move my legs (which also had sensors on them) from the ankle down, make a snoring sound, hold my breath for 5 seconds, and breathe through my nose. Everything was all good, so I was now set to go to sleep.
I had been laying in bed for a while now and was pretty damn ready to sleep. Saturday night I had a few too many cocktails, so I was exhausted on Sunday. I was out in less than 5 minutes. I remember waking up a couple times, but nothing beyond the norm. Only thing that bothered me was that I was conscious of pulling out wires, so if I wanted to roll over or shift around I had to pay attention to the cords and make sure I didn't yank anything. I had a few dreams too. A couple were bad, but I can't remember what they were. Same with the good ones. All I know is I had a few dreams. Why do I bring this up? Because it was on the outgoing questionaire.
All of a sudden the lights are on and Brian is standing in the room telling me it's all over. He unhooks me from a few wires and straps and I sit up so he can get the rest undone. I seriously barely remember him unhooking me. Then I sat down, filled out an exit questionaire and used a comb to get most of the goop out of my hair. I still need to take a shower to get the rest of the shit out, but it got most of it. Last night it looked like blue toothpaste, today it looked like paste you would use out of a glue stick. It had about the same consistancy too. The same guys I saw getting ready the night before were all doing the same things I was. They were sitting on their beds with tape on their heads waiting for their tech to come in and take it off. I snuck a peek at the files sitting at Brian's desk to see what was up. The guy in the next room had marked on the front of his folder "CPAP SLEEP APNEA" and mine said, "OBSTRUCTIVE SLEEP APNEA." No idea what that means or if it means anything at all.
Before leaving, Brian let me know that my O2 levels didn't drop down to the bottoms he's seen with other patients that were much worse, but that I did wake up several times and did stop breathing a lot. He let me know that the results would be formatted for viewing by my doctor and that I should be hearing from the medical center within a week. Sometimes it takes only a few days and others it could take up to a week and a half, but if I don't hear from my doctor in 2 weeks to give them a call. I told him that I had maintained my weight around 350lbs while I was playing ball and that when I got weighed in recently I was only 300 and he joked about the results saying, "I'd like to see how bad this was when you were THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY POUNDS. lol."
So I made it out in one piece. The test was simple and really wasn't much of anything once everything was all set up. I thought it would have been harder to sleep or less comfortable a place, but the Morristown Rehabilitation Center really kicked a truck load of ass. I couldn't have asked for a nicer staff, better room, better explanation of what was going on, etc. It was actually kind of fun. At least now there is evidence of what's goin on instead of all speculation and amateur diagnosis.
I'm going to stop this snoring bullshit. Final stage is going to be hearing from my doctor and knowing exactly what to do. I'm so excited to finally be able to live a normal life. All you people out there that have been wondering where I've been... I'll be rarin to go soon.
NJX70.... OUT.
