As promised: some hints on how to deal with a sleep study (sorry, this is loooong - I’ve had 6, all awful in their own way, and as you can tell I HATE them). The headings first for quick reference, then my ramblings about each, below that.
- Schedule it when you can spend the next day trashed.
- Be sleep deprived for the study
- Bring your own pillows.
- Be prepared to trot out your inner bitch.
- Do a dry run if possible
- Bring entertainment that does not rely on room lighting or a TV.
- Don’t count on styling your hair that day
- Bring a snack and something to drink
- Remember, you are being watched
- People who run sleep clinics are a) in it for the money, and b) stoopid.
Details:
1) Schedule it when you can spend the next day trashed.
They will try to tell you that you can shower and go to work afterward (most places even have showers right there).
They are lying. You will not sleep well. The beds are hard. There are wires everywhere on your head and face. There are bands across your chest. There are wires connected to your legs. They wire you up on their schedule, not yours. They put you to bed on their schedule, not yours. They wake you up on their schedule, not yours. For some unknown reason, this is at 5:30 AM regardless of whether you have had 4 hours of sleep, or 6… then they let you drive yourself home when you’ve had the worst night of sleep in years.
The sheets are scratchy and the pillows are covered with crinkly disposable covers that make noise every time you move. If you like to watch a little TV before bedtime, well, good luck with that! I’ve found the presence / absence of TVs in the rooms about a 50/50 proposition - and if they DO have a TV, there’s usually no fucking remote. So if you don’t want to watch the 700 Club or whatever was on when you get wired up, too damn bad.
They will be surprised when you express concern that you may not sleep well. This suggests to me that they explicitly refuse to hire technicians who have ever undergone a sleep study.
Bottom line: unless you are a product tester at a Serta factory, you will not be able to be productive at work the next day.
2) Be sleep deprived for the study
I know, by definition you’re sleep deprived or you wouldn’t be there. But the stress of a strange place, along with all the discomforts of an uncomfortable bed, make it quite hard to sleep at all soundly. Unless you are the sort who can fall asleep during a parade, featuring a brass band playing Sousa’s Greatest Hits (and you’re the lead trombonist)… there’s a fair chance you will have trouble sleeping. “They” claim you’ll do well enough… um, then why did it take me FOUR sleep studies to detect enough apnea to be worth treating?
I’ve learned to get no more than 4 hours of sleep the night before a test. For me, ideally I do them on a Saturday night… which lets me be brain-dead two days in a row.
**3) Bring your own pillows. **
Theirs will small, hard, and noisy (see above). When you’re checking in at the clinic, chances are there will be others in the waiting room. You can tell who’s done this before by who has a bag full of pillows.
4) Be prepared to trot out your inner bitch.
When the technician - who has been popping into the room every time you turn over (because they listen in, it’s part of their job) to make sure you don’t need anything (and thereby waking you out of whatever miserable semi-sleep you’ve drifted into) - ignores you when you really DO need something like a bathroom trip (you’re connected by a switchboard’s-worth of wires to this enormous plug thingy and you CANNOT get up without help)… well, sometimes screaming that you are GOING TO WET THE BED may be necessary. No, unfortunately, I am not making that up… and no, I wasn’t quite that desperate but I’da done it… out of sheer spite. Fortunately (or unfortunately, heh) she finally came in that time. I have no clue what she was doing. That was the same technician who, at 3 AM when I decided this was bullshit and told her to unwire me, argued. I finally told her “I am not asking. I am telling you. I am leaving”. I got an acetone-soaked rag shoved in my face for my trouble (she was using it to soften the Krazy Glue they’d attached all the leads to my scalp with).
A cousin got creeped out by the technician and left before the study even happened.
Another technician forgot to give me anything to attach the wire-bundle to - it’s rather hard to use the toilet and wash your hands when you have this heavy thing you can’t put down or drop for fear of yanking off the leads. That was more of an annoyance than a real problem… but when I asked the day technician (this was the 24-hour study), he was stunned that they hadn’t given me a strap to use to hold onto the heavy thing.
Yet another place - where the sole purpose of the study was to measure my breathing with a cannula vs. a thermocouple - tried to tell me they were out of the cannulas and would have to use a thermocouple. As this was, quite literally, the only reason I was repeating the study, I raised hell and threatened to leave. They found a cannula.
5) Do a dry run if possible
Most places wouldn’t even let me see what the room was like beforehand. One place (the place we both now go) actually recognizes that it’s hard to sleep in a strange place… and for a small fee (30ish) you can spend a night there sometime before your real study - not wired up, of course. So you know the location, you know how to get into the building, you know what the rooms are like…
**6) Bring entertainment that does not rely on room lighting or a TV. **
By this I mean: have an ebook or book with booklight. Have an iPod or at least a boom box to make background noise. The clinics are often noisy or at least there are weird background noises that you aren’t familiar with. Since you’re expected to fall asleep on THEIR schedule… which might differ from your own… something to occupy you if you have insomnia can turn that hellish “tick… tick… tick… how many hours have passed?” into a few minutes of reading / listening and then falling asleep.
**7) Don’t count on styling your hair that day **
They no longer use glue that requires acetone to remove the leads from your scalp. Instead, they use this sticky contact goo that looks like a jarful of translucent snot. You will find blobs of this in your hair the next day.
Yes, even if you’ve washed your hair. Twice.
8) Bring a snack and something to drink
Pretty self-explanatory - you might get the munchies while waiting around, or your stomach might get to growling, which is a discomfort you might ignore at home… but at the sleep lab you want to be able to minimize distractions / discomfort. Don’t drink too much though (see above for bathroom logistics).
9) Remember, you are being watched
If one of your solutions to insomnia is, um… “stress relief”… remember you’re on an IR camera the whole time so you might or might not want to indulge. While I suspect they’ve seen just about everything, I personally would feel a bit inhibited!
**10) People who run sleep clinics are a) in it for the money, and/or b) stoopid. **
Since sleep apnea etc. have become such big news and big business, clinics have cropped up all over the damn place. Used to be you had to go to a semi-major hospital to find one, now they’re all over in private doctors’ offices. Not that comfort was ever a high priority, but you’re subject to an even bigger “luck of the draw” regarding the skill of the staff and the quality of the facilities.
There may be a bathroom connected to your room, or you may have to walk down a BRIGHTLY LIT hallway for that midnight potty trip. The best of the places I’ve been had that particular failing! Egad.
There may be a bedside lamp that you can control, or they may UNPLUG THE DAMN LAMP so you can’t even read yourself to sleep.
You may get a double bed or you may get a single bed. Either way, it will be hard and uncomfortable. And usually it will jiggle and the springs will creak when you move.
There may or may not be shower facilities. So far, all but one has had something (I think… I always wait until I get home to shower) but one that proudly touted that they did… the stall was in use as a storage room.
Another place: the doctor who ordered the test sorta wanted to do some sort of esophageal probe - to measure what, I’m not entirely sure. He was sure I’d be able to sleep with a tube up my nose and down my throat. I suggested this MIGHT be possible if they sedated me. He said that would mess up the data. I said that without the sedation, there would BE no data and respectfully declined that step.