Sleep Study

To those of you who've never had a sleep study or have never seen what one looks like, I'm going to tell you.

It takes an hour "to hook you up." When the test was being explained to me, I found it hard to believe this. How long can it take to stick a couple wires on you? Ha, ha, ha.

First, they take a tape measure and measure your head. They then take a wax pencil and mark on your scalp. Then, they take a waxy goopy substance, smear it onto your head in several places, stick leads into it, and then cover it with gauze squares. I'm not entirely sure, but I think I had about 5 - 8 leads in my hair. I think I had two stuck to my forehead - these are just leads attached to stickers - no goop. Two leads on my cheeks, three on my chin/jaw. One microphone (for detecting snoring) on my throat. Two stickers on my chest, and one on each of my legs. And no, I didn't shave ahead of time.

Then, you know when people are in the hospital, and they have the nose oxygen tube? Well I had TWO things like that in my nose (oh, my gosh, did they tickle, they had long plastic and long wires to go deep into your nose to measure who knows what - by the way, I pluck nose hairs inside my nose, because I can't stand the tickling - so you can guess how that junk felt in my nose), the wires ran up over my ears. Then the whole mass of wires is pulled into a kind of ponytail at the back of your head. Then I had a chest strap with another strap around that to detect what position I'd lay in. I had another strap around my middle. Oh, and by the way, a scratchy plastic wristband issued to every hospital "guest."

Oh, and by the way, when they let you go to the bathroom, it's really hard to go due to paranoia of that whole birds nest of wires falling into the toilet.

So after you're all hooked up, they tuck an electronic box under your pillow that all these wires are hooked up to, they do a few tests from their office to make sure it's all hooked up correctly, and then tell you to GET COMFORTABLE and go to sleep.

GET COMFORTABLE!!!???? Then you're obsessing, because not only are you not comfortable, but if you don't fall asleep, you might not get a diagnosis for all of this work, and everything might still be IN YOUR HEAD! It's really stressful. :o) (And, by the way, I had my daughter telling me ahead of time that I'd be tooting as I fell asleep and embarrassing myself horribly. When I shared this with my boss, he said they probably have Chester the Molester manning the controls. Yeah, try to sleep while thinking about all that!!)

By the way, I took this myself with my phone after some of the hardware was removed. I'm embarrassed that I'm even sharing it: