zzzZZZzzz..Sleep Study..zzzZZZzzz

One week of Sleep Deprivation, Radiotracers, and Wires on the Cranium.

-Sunday Night/Monday Morning-

My father often describes his childhood in topographically-charged Reading as a place where the distance between home and school is "uphill, both ways." He says this facetiously, but his stories are also meant to sting later generations of car-using school-goers, myself included, for whom walking to school was never an option or a hardship until we lived on college campuses, where the options (or hardships) became the choice between attending on time, attending late, or not attending at all.

Pittsburgh, like Reading, is very hilly, and as I circled the sleep lab looking for other ways in, I noticed that my path was uphill both ways. They've left me little time to muse over this before I enter the lab for another night, and I pass through the psych building puffing with incline exertion, determined to master my breathing before the thirteenth floor and my tormentors.

As it happens, I needn't have hurried. Kathy the insomniac (a real one) is watching TLC's endless loop of Trading Spaces, which I find oddly stressful. I'm not worrying about whether or not they'll like what's been done to their rooms, but over the dangerous way the amateurs couples - and sometimes their amateur children - wield powertools.

The Trading Spaces episodes are embedded with commercials for (Hey! Synergy!)other episodes of Trading Spaces and their splinter shows. The only one that really caught my attention was the "What not to wear" teaser:

"She was a grad student.. and she dressed like one. Now that she has her PhD, its time to change her wardrobe."

The techs arrive and glue wires to my hair. Unlike last time, none of the wires end up on my legs or up my nose, and I'm a bit more comfortable when I settle down to read in the remaining hour before lights out. A weariness took hold that I could not identify; that seemed promising.

Except that I did not fall asleep at midnight as expected, even though I was more comfortable than before. Just drifting in the silent darkness.. Someone had removed the foam from the window, so hospital helicopter noise would have made sense. But there is no noise, and I drift, sliding form one end of the Stanford Sleepiness Scale to the other. I drift, dreaming unpleasantries until I wake up (or merely sit up) at the arrival of the morning scientists.

I am not looking well, they imply, and Scientist J is upset by my story of sleeplessness. Evidently I am supposed to deprive myself of sleep only on their terms, and this transgression is my fault. He sanctions a one-hour nap in the afternoon. But for now I am to lie perfectly still, starring intently at a blue dot in the ceiling while all of the tubes attached to my arms and all the wires attached to my head are passed through a hole in the wall to a machine in the next room.

Five minutes of eyes open, five minutes shut, twenty minutes eyes open, twenty minutes eyes shut. The instant I begin to fall asleep, they know, and will come and jostle me awake. This happens twice.

After this exercise I am led to the adjacent building and the PET scanner. For some reason, the hospital insists that all patients ride in a wheelchair, ambulatory or not. I'm embarrased by this, it feels uncomfortably like the waking weariness of last night.

A PET scanner, for those lucky enough to have never seen one, is a large blocky machine with a cylindrical hole. Unlike the CAT scanner, the hole is intended only for the patient's head. Like the CAT scanner, the patient must remain as motionless as possible for the control technicians to capture the picture.

Entirely new techs greet me here. I recognize the younger of the two, tech K, from Ritter's a few months ago. She wore clubbing attire then, black pants, a silver lame top and white eye-liner; now she's wearing blue scrubs like everyone else in this section of the hospital. The white eye-liner is the same.

Tech T is business-like and solictious at the same time: "When you go in, be as still as possible. Remember, you are a volunteer, and can leave at any time."
This is the first time anyone connected with the project has said anything about the possibility of me backing out, and I'm suddenly seized with an urge to do just that. Is she trying to tell me something? I'm irritated by the mandatory wheelchair ride, irritated by the extra wiring that was never supposed to be on my head this long. I'm furious about my movements being curtailed and the restriction on coffee. I want this I.V. tube out of my arm, PRONTO.

But I conceal my displeasure for the moment and step inside the machine.

Fact.

I'm losing my sense of humor about this whole thing. Less humor all around, and while I haven't spoken ill of anyone working here, I am thinking unpleasant things about their work ethic, skills and personalities. Nurse Maggie is a darling woman, but she stuck me incorrectly with the needle. I assured her that I was fine, but when she chalked it up to rhematoid arthritis, I was more irked than I let on. Why stick anyone, then? Tech C, an unpleasant woman with Disney attire under her smock and hair the color of stale wheat thins, made me wait a long time before removing the wires this morning; eating with mechanical linguini in my face isn't my favorite activity. Then there's scientist J. He has a pleasant demeanor, but I'm beginning to envision him as the chief tormentor I see far too often.

And the real problem was deeper, and would come to a head before Friday. But I didn't know what it was yet.

Despite these doubts, I aced the concentration and reflexology tests.