The Sleepover

I went to a sleepover Tuesday night.

Not the fun kind, where you eat junk food and make prank phone calls and stay up all night watching scary movies.

That’s probably good, because it was a school night and if I stay up too late I can be really grouchy the next day.

Instead, it was the kind where I packed only my necessities for the night.

Which in this case involved something that could pass as pajamas, my reading glasses, computer, iPod, headphones, cell phone, a book, 3 magazines, pens and notepad among the other stuff that normally lives in my overnight bag.

When I got there about 8:00 in the evening I was shown to my room by a very nice young lady who said she would be “attending” to me for the night.

Before you think, “Boy, is SHE barkin’ up the wrong tree there!”, you ought to know that she was in purple scrubs and is a nurse.

She wired me up like Frankenstein’s monster (pre-lightning bolt), told me that she’d be watching me sleep all night on the video monitor (a bit of news that’s destined to make you think REALLY hard about where you scratch during the night, among other things!) and then brought out an assortment of plastic hoses and stuff that look like the fake scuba gear that little kids play with at the beach.

I was going to undergo a sleep study, about the same as I did a year and a half ago, except this time I’d be hooked to a machine that was going to blow air into my head all night, filling me like a balloon whether I liked it or not. The model I chose just has two plugs that go into your nostrils, which still would make a sneeze exciting, but much less the experience that the full face masks that were offered.

Other than having to sleep on your back – which isn’t my norm – and the grief of trying to get that gooey stuff that holds the electrodes on out of your chest and leg hair, it really wasn’t that big a deal. After a few minutes, you learn to kind of relax into the airflow and breath with the machine. It was already past my bedtime, and the room had a nice television, although there was no internet available. Email and the myriad of sites I check regularly would have to wait until the next day.

The next morning, I woke up at my regular time – about 5 – but instead of dragging myself downstairs to look for coffee I had a realization.

I felt better than I had in a while. Rested. Rejuvenated. Like I used to feel when I was in my 20’s.

I felt good for a couple of days, even.  Of course, I still had coffee, but I felt better even before the coffee.

Eventually, I got a call from the doc’s office. Surprise, surprise – I have sleep apnea, just like my dad, his dad and my two brothers. We could be a case study if there were federal funding available for such a study.

So one day in the near future, the Home Health people will drop by with something medical. Somehow, I didn’t think we’d be facing that for several more years, but for some reason you can’t just go to their store and pick it up. They have to come out to show me how to plug the electrical cord into the outlet in the wall, and to fit the little rubber hose into their machine. The cynical part of me suspects that billing is more profitable than that of simply going into the store and picking things up.

But maybe not. In any event, I hope that I’ll start sleeping a bit better in the near future.

And if not, well, next year’s Halloween costume will be easy enough to figure out with all the scuba gear I’ll have.