In which I have slept

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

And the preliminary verdict: Okay, I can do this.

I slept well last night. No superlatives, no embellishment; I slept well. I woke up substantially fewer times than I usually do (we’re talking about waking up long enough to roll over and go back to sleep, to be clear) and for the first time in a long time I didn’t wake up needing to go to the bathroom, which I have a hard time believing is related to the CPAP but might be. My wife reports that there was no snoring, and I spent at least some of that time asleep on my back, which was previously entirely impossible.

At around 7:00 in the morning I woke up and realized that at some point I had at least slightly kinked the hose that was providing me with air; I repositioned it and it started making a sort of clicking sound as the machine got the pressure in the mask back up to level. Once I realized what time it was and that the clicking was a little annoying I went ahead and got up and went to the bathroom (at 7:00, that’s not “waking up in the night,” since it’s later than I sleep in during the week) and put in some eyedrops and checked my face to see if the mask had left indentations. It hadn’t, which honestly kind of surprised me a little bit, and I didn’t feel like my mouth or my nostrils were dried out or anything like that. At that point I’d had my mask on for nine hours, so I didn’t bother putting it back on and went back to sleep for a couple more hours. I’m supposed to wear it for at least four hours a night, so I was all good from the insurance end of things.

It is probably worth pointing out that I actually considered just staying up at 7:00, which I’m pretty sure I have never done on a Saturday in my entire life without a damn good reason.

I have typically been a side/stomach sleeper, so one of the big concerns was that at some point I would have to roll over onto my stomach and the mask would make that difficult. I can only assume/hope that people know what I mean when I say this; that feeling that you have to roll over just never hit me. Again, it feels weird to suggest that was because of the mask, but who the hell knows. I think tonight I’m going to switch to the nasal pillows and see how that goes.

I don’t want to turn the site into a sleep diary or anything, but I’ll report back tomorrow about the nasal pillows. In the meantime, since they send you three sizes of mask every time they send you a mask, I’ve got four masks I’m never going to use. Does anybody happen to know something useful I could do with them?

Zzzzzz

Luther M. Siler

So when they test you for sleep apnea, or rather, before they test you for sleep apnea, they make you take this test that ranks you on something called a Sleepiness Scale, which doesn’t sound like it should be a thing but it is. There’s lots of questions about falling asleep in inappropriate contexts and places and stuff like that.

I think the number of days I have taken naps have outnumbered the days I didn’t in the last couple of weeks, and I came home and died in my recliner for a couple of hours after work today. Wednesday we’re getting a whole ass new sofa delivered and I am going to climb into it and sleep my entire five-day Thanksgiving break away.

This is all to say that I have nothing for you this evening, except that my recliner is really comfortable.

In which I’ve wasted the weekend

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

Welp.

Friday night I took an Emergency Brain Pill. I wasn’t necessarily having a mental health emergency or anything really close to it, but I basically use these pills when I can’t get my brain to shut off and let me sleep, and what with the God-tier sleep apnea I apparently also have, and having survived my first week in the new building, I figured I was owed a decent night’s sleep. The pill kicked my ass, rendering me a useless, sluggish mess all day Saturday and requiring a three-hour nap in the middle of the afternoon. Then today my son had his Lego Robotics competition, which somehow went from 8:15 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon, and by the end of it the boy was so bored he was in tears.

I have … some issues with how this competition was organized. Nothing I can really yell at anybody about, because there’s only one competition, and they didn’t place high enough to advance to the state-level competition in December, but from what I can tell most of the people involved are okay with that. Regardless, we got home around five and all of us died. I had grading planned for tonight, and fuck that. They can wait a little longer, they’ll be okay.

Sometime in the next couple of days I need to do a book review– the short version is that Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful is magnificent– and think out loud a bit about how grading needs to work in my new building. But this is all I’ve got for tonight, I think.

My evening

Luther M. Siler

Came home from work, immediately took a nap, woke up long enough to reheat a plate from the dinner that I slept through and now I’m going to bed.

So far so good

Luther M. Siler

Got through a day of meetings without any rage-murders, although I may have a teacher to talk off the ledge tomorrow morning, we’ll see. So far no one has tested positive for Covid in my house either, and we all took tests this morning. I just went through the schedules of all my students and reported any inconsistencies or problems I found and I think 7:41 PM is a decent time to be done working for the day, especially since I was expected to be at work before 8.

There was no video posted to my YouTube site today, because first week of school, so I’m going to go see if I can get the next couple of days knocked out before I fall asleep. Tomorrow will be a late night because I have school and then Parent Night, so if I don’t post anything don’t get too het up about it.

Nineteen years. Let’s do this.