I started this on the WordPress mobile app, then discovered I can’t manipulate the post the way I can in the browser.
I’m in a sleep study tonight. I’m fighting with the mask because it’s making the fart noise. CPAP users will know what I’m talking about. I remembered that I’ve been doing this a lot lately. Fighting with the mask causes me to roll over. Back and forth. I think to myself it’s all in how you hold your mouth.
That explains everything. Everything that doesn’t want to work in life even though it should. It’s all in how you hold your mouth. Miskeys. Plotting errors. Gaming errors. Automobile maintenance. Using any kind of mechanical device.
It’s all in how you hold your mouth.
Ah, sweet relief.
Man I could use a drink right now I think. My mouth is as dry as a bone. My tongue feels like sandpaper on the roof of my dry mouth. I can’t have a drink though, because my CPAP mask is on.
Oh right. Nasal mask. The nurse asked me if I wanted to change masks before I started this night of sleep testing. Maybe I should try a nasal mask. Then how I hold my mouth may not be that much of a problem anymore. At least, when it comes to sleeping with my CPAP mask on it won’t be. When I’m button-mashing while playing a video game, it’s still going to be important. I have chin straps for making sure the mouth is closed when I’m wearing the mask. I don’t need to have the mouth covered with the mask.
I was slowly strangling. I was underwater. A place that can be heaven for me, so long as I can get back to air when I want to. But I couldn’t get back to air. There was a puzzle in front of me. I had to solve that puzzle to get back to the surface and breath. How did I get here? Why couldn’t I breathe?
Oh, something was holding my mouth closed, and my sinuses were blocked. How odd. Why not open your mouth to breath? Underwater? A voice in the back of my head says “you are not underwater, moron. Breathe!” So I open my mouth and breathe, and then I wake up.
The stupid CPAP machine is off again. I don’t know if I forgot to turn it on, or if I turned it off in my sleep, or if the machine is simply failing. What I do know is that this is the second time in a few weeks that I’ve had my sleep disturbed by it being off while I have the mask and chin strap on, and the dream that prompts me to wake up is that underwater puzzle dream. I can almost picture it and the game it is part of, but the image escapes me now. It was so vivid in the dream.
Almost a nightmare. I can’t go back to sleep even though I’ve only been in bed for a few hours. So I get up and pad around. Eat a little cereal, take an antihistamine and an expectorant, try to relax. After a few hours I padded back to bed and again tried to sleep. This time I woke convinced the power was off. I feel back asleep with my hand over the exhaust port on the CPAP mask, reassured that the machine was working by the air washing over my fingers.
…even more reassuring is the knowledge that I will be going in for a recheck of my sleep issues in the coming weeks. Then at least I’ll know whether it is mechanical failure, deteriorating health, or active imagination that is causing the CPAP to stop working sometimes. Fingers crossed in the meantime.
I woke up dizzy Monday. Dizzy, not vertiginous. With vertigo, the world spins. Or rather, with rotational vertigo, the world spins, generally in a horizontal direction (don’t ask me which way, because my brain will lock up) I took a bunch of drugs trying to make it better. Nothing made it better. Dizziness is (as I’ve said elsewhere) the most common complaint that doctors hear. It means completely different things to different people. This dizziness is a feeling of being on the verge of falling/fainting, pretty much with every step.
Tuesday I woke up, dizzy again. This time dizzy and with chest congestion. I had taken the CPAP mask off to answer the phone, and simply neglected to put it back on at about 8 am (trying to schedule appointments with mundanes means being clear and attempting to be coherent at 8 am when they return calls) so when I finally got out of bed at noon, I had a nice wheeze going and a tickle in the middle of my chest. Needless to say, I took a round of allergy drugs and my regular daily medications, put the mask back on and went back to sleep.
When I woke back up again, the tickle was gone, the dizziness was lessened and I wondered about the cause of the dizziness since the mask filters all my breathing air. I tried wearing a particulate mask around the house for awhile and that seemed to help, but then I had to talk on Discord for the guild raid that night, and the tickle and congestion returned.
Funny thing is, I can stick my finger in my left ear and trigger the inside out vision for a brief second or two. It makes the dizziness much worse, to the point of almost blacking out. The right ear, even though I have bilateral (both ears) Meniere’s, does nothing to my equilibrium. That is a puzzle.
Allergies? Barometric pressure? Meniere’s flaring up? I don’t think it’s the latter because the dizziness is wrong. I’ve already gone to the ENT once this month, so I’m visiting the GP today to see if it’s something he can figure out. If not it’s back to the ENT for another needle in the ear and the nasty taste of drugs in the back of my throat for two weeks. Fun. Fun. Fun.
…I mention all of this because I decided that this week was the week to try communicating with people, and I can tell that my writing is less than coherent. I’m hoping the above was coherent. Who knows? I won’t for at least a week. Also, I’m in the middle of reorganizing my website and my blog, as well as revisiting the wisdom of my presence on several social platforms and I will be leaving more than one of them, permanently. So I’m largely incommunicado and unwilling to compose text in my normal fashion because that has lead to a lot of time wasted trying to recover lost work when things go sideways. (see my last post) and what little conversation I am required to engage in is probably incoherent to at least one side of the conversation. Maybe even both. I’d really like to get away from the problems that started back in mid-August. This is getting old. Really old.
Editor’s note: November 8, 2018 – The spell finally seems to be passing, but the complete lack of change in the body politic of Texas has me in such a funk that I doubt I’ll be writing much of anything positive for awhile still. I have a few cutting polemics in mind, but the better angels of my nature may keep me from ever publishing them here. On the other hand, I’m about to go off on relatives on Facebook again, so the inner troll may also get access to the keyboard here. Stay tuned.
First things first. Get an editor that won’t eat my drafts while I’m composing. When I get that all worked out, I will certainly write about that process. Writing about it is part of the process.
“I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.”
Every time I have to change my clocks (whether it’s to fall back or spring forward) the blood pressure goes up a few points just contemplating Daylight Saving Time.
I’ve tried just ignoring it in the past, and that didn’t work out too well. Missed appointments, extremely early arrivals, whatever. Not really a solution. I’ve tried going to bed earlier in advance of the change, setting the clocks ahead early, also not very effective. You name it, I’ll bet you I’ve tried it. No matter what, this time change thing always turns into a nightmare.
Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Hudson, whose shift work job gave him leisure time to collect insects and led him to value after-hours daylight. In 1895 he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch, he followed up in an 1898 paper.
They were apparently smart enough to realize that this really didn’t change anything about when the sun comes up. Leave it to the ever efficient Germans to think that they can control the sun’s motion in the skies through legislation. They were the first ones to pass DST into law, so that much of the Last Week Tonight segment is true. The Germans were hoping to conserve coal for the war effort during World War One, but current studies show that there is no energy benefit for instituting DST,
The result of the study showed that electricity use went up in the counties adopting daylight saving time in 2006, costing $8.6 million more in household electricity bills. The conclusion reached by Kotchen and Grant was that while the lighting costs were reduced in the afternoons by daylight saving, the greater heating costs in the mornings, and more use of air-conditioners on hot afternoons more than offset these savings. Kotchen said the results were more “clear and unambiguous” than results in any other paper he had presented.
Kotchen and Grant’s work reinforces the findings of an Australian study in 2007 by economists Ryan Kellogg and Hendrik Wolff, who studied the extension of daylight saving time for two months in New South Wales and Victoria for the 2000 Summer Olympics. They also found an increase in energy use.
I can clearly see why DST is cherished and loved by authoritarians everywhere. I’m sure the #MAGA are foursquare in favor of it. I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate the power and authority of government, that even the sun can be commanded by His Electoral Highness. Now that is a showcase of control on a grand scale (in China they only have Beijing time. Talk about authority) Trump can dictate what time the sun comes up and the sun will listen. Maybe he should tackle that Pi thing, try dictating that it will be 3.2 or something. I’m sure that will work just as well.
I can hear you laughing, dear reader, but I’ve had this argument several times with many different people. Inevitably the person who thinks DST is a good idea will exclaim,
Do you really want the sun to come up at 5:30 in the morning in the summer?
It still does come up at 5:30 in the morning, we just call it 6:30.
I’m coming to the conclusion that there should just be UTC and local time. Local time can then be set according to the city authority or whatever the farmer in the field wants it to be. UTC is really the only relevant time anyway. The only time relevant aside from where the sun is in the sky on a given day. Local sunrise or sunset is the only metric that matters in the end. Timezones themselves have been rendered pointless by modern mechanisms. Not even trains rely on timezones anymore.
Imagine just for a few minutes, what it would be like for your GPS to calculate time variance based on degrees of longitude rather than twenty-four one hour timezones. In the same way your phone can change times for daylight savings, it can change time to keep up with your actual position on the globe. The device that you already rely on to tell you what time it is could just do the time calculation for your location and actually tell you what the local time is. The satellites that control GPS already perform these calculations just to be able to talk to each other and establish UTC for themselves.
Cities could assert their own authority and set time for the regions they control. That measure of standardization for a specific local area is understandable, but why would a farmer care what time it is in the city unless he is going there? Why does someone in Austin need to care what the time is in Denver, Washington D.C. or Los Angeles? If you need to know, ask your phone like you do for every other thing you need during the day already.
Why is this so hard to figure out?
It is entirely possible that my hostility to time and time change hinges on my long struggle with dysgraphia and sleep apnea. With Meniere’s. Even with the CPAP machine and amitriptyline (for migraines) I can still find myself staring at the ceiling at two AM wondering what did I do in a previous life to deserve this torment? Repent, Harlequin! I have always hated punching a clock. Getting up in the morning. I am a night owl. I can be more productive from midnight to two AM than most people are at any other point in the day. What I have always hated the most though was the silly notion that eight AM was starting time. There is absolutely nothing I hate more than sitting in traffic trying to get to the office in the morning, trying to get anywhere in the morning.
“he walks unhindered through the picket lines today, he doesn’t think to wonder why”
“packed like lemmings into tiny metal boxes, contestants in a suicidal race”
It is a stupid energy-wasting exercise, to be sitting idling on the freeway adding to the toxic funk that hangs over the city. It amuses me now, sitting in traffic in the EV. Finally I don’t have to worry about the pollution from sitting in traffic since I’m not adding any. But why eight AM? Why not 6:30? Why not 9:30? If you are working in a downtown office like I did for many years (100 Congress, top floor of the building at one point. Fireworks were a blast to watch from up there) any time other than eight AM was a good time to start. Any time other than five PM was a good time to quit.
This topic is a frequent flyer around here because WE’RE STILL FUCKING DOING THIS STUPID SHIT. Posted here and here previously. Oh yeah and also in the Spring when we took the hour away that we now give back.
Allergies have been kicking my ass for the last month. The Mother-in-Law has been declining in health for the last three months, requiring The Wife to be away for weeks at a time coordinating her care. This development has laid more burdens on my shoulders, more responsibility than I have had to maintain stress levels under than I have had to endure since going on disability.
The Son is a senior in high school, The Daughter has a job and neither of them drive yet. I have to train them to drive in one direction, getting them to their respective appointments on time in the process, and still be able to drive myself back home without triggering Meniere’s symptoms.
ascending to 15,000 feet
With all of this going on, health of relatives, my health, my children’s demands on my time, etc, I’ve still written more in the last few months than I have in years. You may well ask “why is that?” because I’m writing this article to tell you why that is, even though this is starting to feel like an infomercial from the inside, my writing of this piece. I’m three months into my CPAP experience and I credit my clearly improved outlook to my much improved sleep patterns.
To start from the beginning; I don’t think I’ve ever slept right at any point in my life. I have never gotten up in the morning on my own. It takes me hours to wake up (still does sometimes) to feel as if I am present in the world. Mornings have always been my enemy, and early arrivals have almost always been impossible to attain. The crime here is that I never thought to ask why this was. Not one time.
I accepted the blame for attendance problems, all my life. You are lazy. You need discipline. You need to do this or that fad thing. More light at different times of the day. Take these sleep aids, take this wake up pill, drink coffee in the morning, etc, etc, etc. The list is never ending and all of it has been wrong. All of it.
I used to get by on 4 hours of sleep a night, pretty routinely. Go to bed at 2am, wake up at 7am, go to work. Usually driving in the morning while not really feeling awake, having had to be shaken awake by The (ever faithful) Wife and pushed out the door with a cup of go juice after the mandatory wake up shower. I have always hated naps. I never feel like I wake up from a nap. The lethargy just continues until I succumb to sleep for several hours.
Weekends were sleep catch up times (something which has been demonstrated not to work) we would sleep well into the afternoon most Saturdays and Sundays, and still not feel well rested come Monday morning when the process started all over again.
Then the Meniere’s symptoms got worse, expanding from the Fall and Spring weeks of suffering to the months of suffering to almost every other day suffering. Rotational vertigo every week, sometimes more than once a week. I had to stop working. I had to figure out what went wrong. Why was this happening to me?
When I started paying attention to how I felt, when I started allowing myself to follow my own rhythms rather than the imposed rhythms of modern society; sleep when I was tired, eat when I was hungry, expend effort when I felt strong enough, I started noticing something about my sleep.
I slept way, way too long. I’m not talking about 9 or 10 hours. Sixteen hours was common, sometimes as long as a full 24 hours. At first we chalked this up to the side effects of the anti-nausea drugs for vertigo symptoms. I’ve always been easy to medicate. I’m a lightweight drinker, and generally another person’s half-dose of medication will have the desired effect on me. But the long sleep wasn’t limited to days when I had been taking medication. I also had very, very long periods of intense dreaming sleep. I’ve written about a few of these in the past. Most of them were unintelligible upon waking, but I really enjoyed them while in them.
Finally this year I decided to start looking into my sleep patterns to see if there was something that could actually be done to get me to sleep something like normal hours. Normal in a modern sense, not a historical sense, which is different.
I went to see a sleep specialist on the advice of one of my doctors. The sleep specialist said sleep apnea before I was even scheduled for a test. Well, that wouldn’t do. I’m not going to a doctor to be sold a treatment without a diagnosis. I was raised by a car salesman, I know when I’m being sold something, and this guy was a salesman and a half. Definitely not a doctor. So after getting another doctor, a real doctor (second opinion time) to understand that I actually wanted to be tested first, I did the sleep study. Eight hours of misery with hardly a wink of sleep from my perspective, trussed up like a turkey with wires and monitors the whole time. The technician swore to the fact that I actually did sleep, and that I stopped breathing just under 30 times an hour while I was asleep. Well within the range of needing a CPAP machine to help regulate breathing during sleep. So a second study wearing the CPAP mask was scheduled.
I was very anxious about sleeping with a CPAP mask. Sleeping with a mask on has always horrified me, in an Alien stuck to your face kind of way. Don’t believe me? This was the nightmare I had while waiting to be tested.
May 19, 2016 2:52 pm – Just woke up from another intense dream. Another architecture dream. But the dream wasn’t architecture, the dream was a video game. The particulars of the dream, the game, the architecture in the game, are not important.What is important is the meaning of the dream, the game, the architecture. I awoke with a profound sense of loss. A future fraught with anguish. Is this what my life is now? Am I defined by my abilities to play a game? It’s been 8 years or so since I picked up World of Warcraft. On the one hand it has kept me attached to people, given me a reason to get out of bed even if I didn’t feel like doing anything besides stare at a screen. On the other hand it consumes a lot of time that I increasingly feel should be devoted elsewhere, if only I felt well enough often enough to do something else.
If that is true, that I am defined by my abilities to play a game, then even by that limited measure I’m not doing too good. I cannot see the game well enough to follow the various bits on the screen and know where to move in time to keep myself alive. As a raid healer, that is a serious problem. I not only have to stay alive, I have to keep others alive. When they start telling you “your job is to stay alive” they are including you in their raid out of the kindness of their hearts and not much else.
My health is deteriorating further. The dreams are a signal. They have become more intense and lengthy as my health has worsened. I can fall asleep one day and wake up almost a full day later and not feel as if I have rested. How is this even possible? The notion that someone who used to brag about being able to get by on 4 (and one half. Most important bit that last half) hours of sleep a night could sleep 9, 10, 12, 16, 28 hours and not feel rested is baffling.
So I’m seeing sleep specialists now. Sleep specialists who are hinting that my sleep has probably never been normal. That I have a problem with sleeping that they can fix. Should I let them fix it? The dreams are all I have anymore. If they make the dreams go away, what will be left that is mine?
So the anguished dream I just woke up from?
I know I am real, but the characters in the dream, they are movie characters even though they stand in for caricatures of my bosses from the past. Frank Gaffney is in charge of the firm. Grace Ripley (blonde in a blue wig?) runs all the operations. The game is part of the business, the architecture of the story. The game mirrors the events that occur in the ‘reality’ of the job, serving as an oracle for what happens next. Except that the dream, the reality, is coming to an end. The game is bugged and can’t be completed. It has to be reset. It resets reality. The characters reform in different roles and the game/reality starts over.
Without my dreams, what am I? If my dreams directed me to take up architecture, informed my designs and my goals, will fixing the sleep problem I’ve apparently had all my life destroy the creative side of my life? Will I finally fully wake up and discover all of it was a dream? The certificates and licenses? The rolls of drawings? The wife and children? What is real? What is the dream? I don’t think I can tell anymore.
I am stuck. Stuck in a cycle that has to be ended. I have to figure out what is ailing me so that I can get back to some sense of normality. I cannot continue to sleep for extended periods and marvel at the texture of the dreams. I guess it is time to really wake up. Hope I see everyone on the other side of treatment. Would hate to lose anyone to a reset.
Trussed up like a Christmas turkey
These were my thoughts about the dream, and the dream itself, before going in for the CPAP test. You are being over dramatic, The Wife objected. Don’t publish that right now. Do the test first. See what happens. So I decided to quash my fears until after the test was completed. Let them remain unvoiced for the time being. But I did vow to start this article at the time. I would record my thoughts about my CPAP experience during and after the diagnosis and treatment. I wanted to at least do that much. Record my fears. The facehugger nightmares. The vague fears that life is passing me by and I can’t do a thing about it. But also to record my experiences with the treatment just as they occurred.
The weird part is, once I tried sleeping with the mask on, I knew I was hooked. Right away. The first test was torture. The wires woke me up. The sensors woke me up. I tossed and turned all night. The second test, the test with the mask on, was the best sleep I had had in years. Years. Longer than I could even remember. Never even noticed the wires and sensors until the next morning. Breakfast was ecstasy. My mind bounced everywhere.
I quite literally could not wait to get a machine for the house so that I could try it out regularly in an environment that I felt was comfortable. That process took a few weeks. Medicare pays, but it isn’t fast about doing it. Eventually I did get a machine for the house and that is when the actual work with the machine, the company that supplied the machine, started.
From the first night I realized that I needed to get something to hold my mouth closed at night. I would wake up with my mouth dry as a bone. The chin strap they sent me was of cheap manufacture, but The Wife is the granddaughter of a seamstress, so there was a remedy for that cheap chinstrap that fell apart problem.
Getting the supplies from the machine supplier is probably the most worrisome part of this process. They are completely unwilling to give you extra parts just in case you might need to swap out straps or masks or filters or anything.
Other than that process, dealing with insurers and medical aid suppliers, the experience with the machine has been pretty smooth sailing so far. I put on my flight mask at night and “ascend to 15,000 feet.” I am in my third month with the machine and although I still sleep as much as twelve or 13 hours on occasion (especially when the allergies trigger Meniere’s. Like today) I can get up in the morning when I need to, for the first time since early in my career as a draftsman. Get The Son to school on time with more regularity than we’ve probably done in his entire life.
I haven’t had time to play many games, what with all the other problems that have had to be dealt with this summer. I think I only managed to go swimming one time, which is a record for me. I generally spend days at a time in the pool. Not this summer. There was definitely no time to start the new version of World of Warcraft, even if I had wanted to (luckily I didn’t) and I still haven’t finished the one game I wanted to play, Skyrim.
I have done some writing though, a lot more writing than I really felt I could pull off. I’m still working on some other articles that I have to publish before the election ends, but I have little fear I’ll get to those too, as well as pick up some articles I’ve left laying around for far too long.
Best of all, the dreams continue. I don’t know why I have these extended dream periods, but I am thankful for them. They are more hopeful these days, at least. Not fraught with horrors and endings like they had been for the last decade or so. Still pretty grim, but a better shade of grim. I’ll take that.
