It doesn't make sense to me that when a person is diagnosed with some sort of sleep disorder, that the first thing they do is wire you up to a machine, stick tubes in your nose and tell you, "Try to sleep normally".

My turn at the sleep centre finally came around. How'd it go? Well, when the one doctor leaves the room because he needs to consult with another doctor and then both of them come back in and the new doctor claps his hands and says, "Well, you're very interesting!"...that doesn't bode all that well.

First off, there is high clinical suspicion that I suffer from 'obstructive sleep apnea', which is where the throat closes up as you relax into sleep. We don't think it's at dangerous levels yet, but they think it's there.

Secondly, they suspect I've developed nighttime 'hyperarousal'. Which is not as fun as it sounds - keep your Viagra jokes to yourself. It's heightened nervousness like the adrenal "fight or flight" reaction characterized by jumpiness and extreme reactions. Basically I lie awake at night dreading and fearing any noise, specifically the sound of Lisa snoring.

Finally, I have other, life-long conditions. It appears I may have had 'delayed sleep phase syndrome' when I was younger, which is basically that my body clock was out of sync with normal people: where everyone else would sleep best between 10 and 6 (or so), my body clock was shifted so that the best sleep times were hours later. Then there's mild touches of insomnia in general and a bit of restless legs syndrome.

What this amounts to is that I'm pretty messed up, sleep wise. Before a year and a half ago, I had managed an equilibrium. The apnea hadn't developed very much yet, and I had grown out of most of the delayed sleep phase syndrome. Plus the comfort and joy of being with Lisa had calmed the insomnia. I was sleeping great every night.

My doctors suspect that the change in both of our nighttime behaviours is related to the large weight-loss we both went through a couple years back. Remember when I won that contest over two years ago with that local TV station and they put me through that intensive weight loss program? Well, I lost fifty pounds and Lisa lost a similar amount. Then we went off the program and were so burned out by the overload that we gained everything right back. I told that to the doctors and they went all, "OH yeah?" with the nodding heads and knowing looks and stuff. So that could be the source of her new snoring patterns and my apnea.

Lisa's snoring is not at abnormal levels generally. Once in a while, things will crank up to serious levels (probably due to her asthma, the level of dust and/or animal-related allergens in our house, etc.), but in general it's nothing a normal person can't sleep through.

Ah, but I'm not normal. The new and unusual noise trigged my insomnia, with the likely help of my own new apnea making me sleep lightly and very probably waking me up by itself on occasion. There are times I likely wouldn't have noticed her snoring at all if I hadn't woken myself up with the sleep apnea. The frustration caused by all this caused the hyperarousal, which has since become habitual, affecting me even on nights of total quiet.

Fun, hey? People, in a physiological and psychological sense, are deeply fucked up creatures.

The doctor's plan is to attack my apnea first. No good working on behavioral triggers and patterns if my physical condition is waking me up every night. The first step is to hook me to the Snoresat machine and see what the actual level of apnea is.

Ever been hooked to one of these? It's awesome. They have a half-dozen inputs, so the doctors can pick and choose from a variety of sensors to attach to your sleeping body. You can take it home, which is good, because the additional strain of trying to sleep wired up in a strange place sure wouldn't help.

My particular sensors included an air tube that poked into each nostril, hooked over my ears and synched under my neck (to measure airflow) a stretchy fabric belly belt with a sensor in the stretchy part (to measure respiratory effort), a light sensor that beams through the tip of an index finger (to measure oxygen content in the blood) and a microphone that tapes to the throat (to measure snore volume and frequency).

Each of these connects to the main box, which has a display that glows brightly green. To keep it close by (to avoid tangles) I stuck it on Lisa's side of the bed (she was in the spare bed for the night) and covered it with the blanket to dull the radiance.

Which, of course, led to a midnight struggle when I went to unplug the machine so I could go to the washroom and found Samantha sleeping on top of it.

I did manage to get a half-decent night's sleep, despite the cables and tape and everything. I credit this to a single dose of Imovane, which seems to be working for me again after being off it for a month. It relaxed me just enough to accept the hoses and move on.

Now I have to wait until the end of November to review the results with the sleep doctors and see what the next step is.

(As a side note, we have some small hope that there's a silver lining behind the loss of Idaho this past weekend. I spent a good couple of hours cleaning out the computer room of all traces of wood shavings, hay and animal hair, plus packing away his cage and stuff into the storage area in the basement. Since then, Lisa has had three full nights of lessened asthma and no snoring whatsoever. I slept like a baby all three nights.

I have my fingers crossed. She was really allergic to Idaho and his various accoutrements, so maybe his absence was just enough to bring her below the snore threshold. I'm not sure of this yet - she's had patches of quiet before, stretching up to a couple weeks - but I am ever hopeful.)

There is nothing in the world better than a good night's sleep, cuddled up in bed with my wife. Nothing whatsoever. And if spending a night taped to sensors with tubes up my nose will help me get back to that, it's entirely worth it.

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