My Sleep Study

The term seems simple enough: sleep study. As I sleep, doctors will study me, right? But no, my friend. Though the term implies sleep, there was almost none of that to be had last night in Chevy Chase, Maryland as I was hooked up to 17 electrodes and one in the nose breathing tube.

Let's start at the beginning. I snore. Horribly. Forcibly. Sometimes waking myself up and making strange noises. A few friends, one of them a doctor, mentioned that I might have sleep apnea. So I began the ordeal a month ago when I visited an ENT. Dr. Schonfeld walked in and said, "Yep, you've got bad anatomy. Tiny nasal passages. I bet you snore."

So there I was last night at the sleep center where they would record me sleeping and measure my brainwaves, breathing, leg twitching. You name it, there was a wire hooked up to it. (Well, not every single thing). I'm in bed at 10:30. That's the most laughable thing because I haven't been to sleep before midnight in years. And I was hooked up to the aforementioned 17 electrodes: one on each leg, several in my hair, on my face, on my chest. A heart monitor on my finger. It was horrible. My nurse Jackie even put a breathing tube in my nose so she could measure my breathing.

Jackie leaves the room and I hear her in the dark like the voice of God, "Blink five times. Move your left ankle. Clear your throat." I fully expected Ashton Kutcher to walk in with a friend or two and say I'd been punked.

You can't imagine what it's like to sleep with wires all over your face and on your legs. I roll around when I'm trying to get to sleep and every time I turned or moved last night, I had to pull a bundle of wires and make sure the air tube hadn't come out of my nose. With all this discomfort, and the pressure of knowing I was being watched and recorded, it took at least an hour to get to sleep. Ususally it takes 10 minutes or so.

I woke up at 1:30 a.m. What I dreaded most had come true: I had to go to the bathroom.

I lean up in the dark and wave at the camera. "Jackie, I have to go to the bathroom," I say. Nothing. No voice of God. No light comes on. I fumble across the desk to try to turn the light on but instead send my cell phone flying across the room. I sit up in bed for about 10 minutes feeling like a child or an adult who can't take care of himself. Jackie finally walks in and unplugs me from the machines, but then I have to go in the bathroom carrying the box which has all 17 wires still plugged into it.

Nightmare.

So I get back in bed, and this time I bet it takes me another hour, maybe an hour and a half to get back to sleep. God, er, Jackie, wakes me up at 6:15 a.m. and rips all 17 electrodes off. The only saving grace is that I had a baseball cap to cover the globs of goo that were still in my hair.

Suffice it to say, should you ever need a sleep study, dread it. Avoid it. If you go, don't drink anything beforehand, and be sure to bring a baseball cap to wear home. I can imagine no worse fate than leaving sticky globs on the benches of the Metro as you ride home from Chevy Chase at 6 a.m.