Sleeping on the job

Curious about how sleep clinics work?

So was Christine Bates, who stepped out of strict reporter mode and into
pajamas to find out for herself.

This autumn, Sharon Hospital opened a new sleep clinic, and brought in sleep expert Dr. Irving Smith to help Tri-state residents overcome a range of ailments and irritations, ranging from insomnia and snoring to narcolepsy.

Lakeville Journal Co. reporter Christine Bates was one of the first to go in for a sleep study,and in this column she shares her experiences.

My check-in time at the Sleep Center at Sharon Hospital was 8 p.m. Pauline, a sleep technician in a white coat, opened the door into a brightly lit, chilly room with a regular bed and gave me a lot of forms to fill out.

Pauline couldn’t comment on the room’s color choices: café au lait walls, espresso-colored curtains and a candy-bar brown bedspread. Does brown make you sleepy?

The accommodations had been described by the doctor as a nice hotel room. Where does he go on vacation? No free shampoo, no shower, no closets, no mini-bar and a rack of purple latex gloves in the bathroom.

After changing into my pajamas — fortunately I brought warm ones — Pauline wired me up with stretchy belts around my chest, sensors on my legs, arms and face, two nose probes for checking on breathing and, ugh, electrodes in my hair. I felt like a suicide bomber hidden in a very cold room.

Now I could relax until it was time to go to sleep. It was very quiet, no distractions. I opened the new book a friend recommended and couldn’t see the print.

Pauline explained that there was not a reading light by the bed because you should not read in bed, you should not watch television in bed and you should not eat in bed. These are bad sleep habits.

The latter was not a problem, anyway, because this particular hotel room does not offer room service.

At 11 p.m., Pauline returned to hook up all the sensors to the monitoring system and turn on the video camera aimed at the bed. All the jumbled, colored wires looked like the phone system of an office building.

Now that I was plugged in, all my sleeping activity would be recorded. When my legs twitched, when I entered deep sleep, snoring, moving, tossing and turning.

The average person stops breathing up to five times an hour and sleep apnea, a dangerous health condition, is diagnosed if breathing stops more than 30 times an hour.

Pauline turned off the lights. I wondered whether the video would be as boring as Andy Warhol’s five-hour-and-20-minute movie, “Sleep.â€�  Maybe I should have asked for a copy of my own seven hours of sleeping.

Why did they call that movie with Tom Hanks “Sleepless in Seattle�? What other sleep movies are there? “The Big Sleep.� William Faulkner wrote the screenplay from Raymond Chandler’s book. Just thinking about Faulkner put me to sleep.

Early the next morning Pauline turned on the lights. “I knew you were awake, I could see it on the monitor.�

So how loudly do I snore? She couldn’t tell me anything. “You have to wait to see the doctor for the results.�

I looked in the mirror and saw The Bride of Frankenstein. All the waxy stuff from the sensors made my hair stick up and out. It was dark outside and no one saw me leave.

When I got back home my husband was still in bed. He’d had a very good night’s sleep.

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