I managed to hurt myself in my sleep last night, which at my age should be no surprise; I spent the whole day feeling like I stuck a walnut-sized rock directly under my neck and just slept on it all night. I’ve been sluggish and my neck has been bugging me all day and I’m just not in the mood at the moment, especially since I just now remembered that I still have to put pretest data into the math team’s form for such things– which was the “I feel like I’m forgetting something” problem from yesterday. So I’m going to get that done and then I’m going to bed and I don’t care what time it is.
I actually missed a day of iLEARN on Friday, as my wife’s aunt passed away; funerals are genuinely just about the only reason I can see myself taking a standardized testing day (especially a math standardized testing day) off, and, well, it happened. Yesterday and today I was in Chicago at my nephew’s birthday party. I have discovered something about my brother that has changed since he married his wife: if he describes something as a party, I am to take that shit seriously, and assume that it’s not going to be six family members I’ve already met. It’s gonna be twenty people and a bunch of kids and since I officiated his wedding they’re all gonna come up to me and go hey, nice to see you again, how have you been? and because I’m a social coward I’m not going to look any of these epos in the eye and dare them to produce my name.
(Everyone was perfectly nice, to be clear; her family is great, as far as I can tell; my brother married very well. That said I was not prepared for a ton of loud noise and adult mingling.)
Anyway, the point is my ass is tired, and on top of all this there’s some other shit going on where either I am a colossal idiot or my doctors have been seriously misleading me. All of this has eaten up all available headspace that I’ve got at the moment, and I still need to put lesson plans together for tomorrow, and after that I’m going to bed. My own bed. Granted, hearing the phrase “We’ve upgraded you to the presidential suite” Saturday night was pretty cool, but not cool enough that I took any pictures, and my bed is always better than a hotel bed.
So, yeah. I’m home. And I’m tired. How’re you? Anyone want to recommend any low-carb meals by any chance?
I discovered last night thatthere are some major drawbacks to my CPAP machine; namely, now that I’ve gotten used to the fucking thing I can’t live without it. The power went out last night around 9:00 PM, interrupting a blog post and half a dozen other things because I was not ready for bed at nine. I read for a little while (not a problem, actually, as I generally wear a reading light around my neck and charges last forever) and then tried to go to sleep, only to be met with a dream about not being able to swallow, which … is not the key to a restful night.
And then at about 1:00 in the morning, wham! Every fucking light in the house goes on at once when the power comes back on, including the ones that were off and we accidentally turned on while turning “off” the lights, and including the ones that we didn’t realize were on when the power went out, including every single fucking light in our bedroom for some reason. So I got about four hours out of my CPAP after maybe three hours of massively un-restful sleep and I was a fucking zombie all day as a result.
Every single class today started with me telling my kids that I was half dead and in a tremendously bad mood and that that part was not their fault but how they reacted to it would be, and I got gentler behavior than usual from all but one class. I am still, hours later, a mess, and only a vast amount of work that needed doing has kept me from going to bed early tonight.
Oh, and apparently one of my subs yesterday just, like, passed out in front of the kids. He was back at work today, so I guess he’s okay, but man, everybody wanted to tell me about it. Maybe my room’s cursed? I dunno.
If, after a reasonably relaxing six-and-a-half hour sleep cycle, you nearly die on the highway on the way to work because 1) somebody parked their car in a really shitty place on an offramp and oh also 2) you’re honestly fighting falling asleep for basically the entire drive, and then you get to work and, bleary-eyed and brainless, try to open your classroom door with your keycard badge, which, uh, doesn’t work on those kinds of doors, just go home. The day is not going to get better.
I also screwed up solving a problem on the whiteboard for my first hour class, only not only could I not find my error, neither could the entire class, and we sat and stared at it as a group for probably ten minutes. Turns out that, while 1.5 is half of three, that doesn’t mean that 3/1.5 equals 1/2! It equals two.
One grown adult, fifteen honors students, and it took me until lunchtime to figure out what I’d done wrong. I definitely should have given up and gone home after first hour.
I am absolutely and undeniably going to die if I’m not asleep within, like, two hours at the most. Today was not a bad day by any stretch of the imagination but it’s been a minute since I’ve had to get up and actually do anything, much less something starting at 7:30 in the morning, and I am about ready to fall down. Have yourself a lovely evening; I’m going to go learn some Arabic and read a little bit and then it’s 8 hours of sleep tonight or bust.
(Remind me to talk more about the CPAP, btw. tl;dr it’s going well.)
We’re expecting up to a foot of snow, starting tomorrow and continuing through Saturday, and tomorrow is the last day of school before Winter Break. No one will be there and it will be fine. And then God will dump a ton of snow on my house so that no one can come talk to me for a couple of days at least, and possibly moving our planned Saturday Christmas dinner to Sunday, which is actual Christmas, which would suit me just fine.
All I need is to get home before the snow starts tomorrow. No problem, right?
Tried the nasal pillow, and … man, that just did not work at all for some reason. I’d had the thing on when we were struggling to make the machine work, but I hadn’t laid down wearing one yet, proper fit or not, and the panic was immediate and uncontrollable. For the record, this is what the thing looks like:
So it’s not as ridiculous as the thing I posted a couple of days ago, where the hose was attached to the top of your head, and in a lot of ways looks more comfortable and more maneuverable than the full face mask, but that thing is constantly blowing a high volume of air into both of your nostrils, and to exhale through your nose you have to overcome the force of the air that’s coming in. I suspect it’s something I can get used to given time, so I’m going to continue trying, but last night apparently was not the time or the place. So I went back to the full face mask, and while I still haven’t quite gotten over the shame aspect of the whole thing (I have issues with people being able to see me when I’m asleep in the first place, and when I know I look stupid, it’s magnified in a way that’s hard to describe) I did once again have a good night’s sleep, and again– despite an experimental large glass of water the hour before going to bed– made it through the night without having to get up to pee. Doing it on any night pre-CPAP was highly unusual. Two in a row has probably not happened in years.
This suggests, by the way, that I was not, in fact, waking up because I had to pee. I was waking up and it happened that I had to pee, but the necessity was not the cause of the waking up. That was, one assumes, the not breathing.
Also, the 7:00 AM roll-over-and-the-machine-starts-popping thing happened again, and it was nearly out of water again, so I’m not sure if I’m blaming the hose or the water reservoir or what, but I turned down the humidity a little bit. I get up around 6 during the week, so it might not happen anyway. We’ll see what happens. That said, if they ever call me and ask me how to improve their machine, “increase the size of the damn water reservoir” seems to be an easy win, as the humidification levels go from 1 through 10 and a 3 didn’t make it through the night. I think they could probably double the size of the damn thing easily. We’ll see if a 2 dries me out.
The stats my CPAP feeds me through my phone also looked better; I don’t know precisely what an “event” is, and I need to find out, but I assume they’re bad, as we want them below five an hour (pre-CPAP, I was at around eighty, I believe) and they were down 20% from Friday night’s recording. So we’ll see what happens on night three tonight.
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?
