Since this place is about 45 minutes away for me, I scheduled it so I could do everything in one trip. I arrived at my appointment time of 5pm, and met with one of the English speaking doctors for about an hour. Then I want to a nearby small restaurant for dinner. After eating, I still had some time to kill, so I stopped at a nice coffee shop and had some tea. Finally around 8:30pm I went back to the sleep center to my appointed room.
Lots of pillows, so I was happy:
And there was a TV, watched a little bit of the movie "Paycheck":
The two night-shift nurses proceeded to hook me up. There were more than 20 sensors hooked to my brain, face, nose, throat, chest, torso, and legs. When all done, I felt like a walking robot:
The nursing staff weren't fluent in English, although one of the nurses was pretty good. The task of answering a questionaire, and installing these numerous sensors was pretty funny with the language barrier. But finally all was successfully completed.
I went to sleep at the appointed time, 11pm. The only issue was my sleep position. They wanted to collect some data with me sleeping on my back. I can't sleep on my back. In fact, it is almost like torture for me to sleep on my back. I tried like a good patient to sleep on my back, but after about 15 minutes I gave up with excrutiating pain. I rolled over to my side and promptly went to sleep. The nurses weren't too happy, but what could we do?
They woke me up again at 5am, telling me the sleep study was over. He removed all the sensors, then said I could sleep longer if I wanted (I did). Seems like they should have just let me keep sleeping, but maybe there is a reason. I woke up at 7am, and took a shower to wash the glue from my hair and body! I was hoping to get some preliminary comments from the nurse, but alas, the shift had changed and the nurse who knew English had gone home. So I'll have to wait until next week to get the official results.
One good news - the doctor warned me that my sleep problem might be so severe, that they would wake me up during the sleep study and get me to use the CPAP breathing machine. In fact, she strongly suspected this would happen. But, it didn't. I can only guess that my sleep problem is not the severe type. Wish me luck.
-The Sleepy Stumbler
1 comment:
You were on your back leaning back in the reclining chair when I heard your sleep breathing or lack thereof. Keep us all posted!
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