How I am supposed to sleep through this?

This weekend I had one more medical test to take. A sleep study. My primary doctor ordered it. He thinks I might have sleep apnea. This is where your throat closes up and you stop breathing at night and when you gasp for air you wake up. Apparently this can happen up to one hundred times a night and you may never realize it! I have very severe allergies (read: allergic to everything under the sun.) According to my mother I have always snored very badly, even as a small child because of my allergies. My husband says I snore and claims to have heard me stop breathing on occasion. Since I’ve never heard myself snore I can’t confirm this.

Anyhow, I went to the Sleep Center on Saturday night and checked in. They connected a ton of electrodes to me. There were two on each of my legs, one under my chin (along with a microphone), one next to each eye, one under each ear, and several on the back of my head. In addition to that, they put straps around my abdomen and chest with sensors on them. It’s a good thing I took a sleeping pill; otherwise, I’d never have slept with that much crap glued/tied to my body.

I haven’t heard anything on results yet, but I’m a little concerned as to the quality of data they may have gotten. You see, sometime in the middle of the night a really loud alarm went off. It scared the hell out of me. When I buzzed to technicians, they came into the room and seemed a bit surprised by the sound. Apparently they hadn’t heard it up front. They returned a couple of minutes later to tell me it was from someone breaking into one of the nearby stores (the sleep center is located in a strip mall.) Yeah, so much for getting a good night’s sleep.

They “put me to bed” around 10 pm and came in around 5:30 in the morning to release me. Hopefully they got the data they needed, ‘cause I gotta tell you, I do not want to do that again! I still have glue in my hair, even after washing it.