Pleasant dreams from a sleep machine

My first visit to a sleep clinic was a disaster.

It all started – like it does for many members of the male species -- with The Little Woman’s completely-unfounded allegations that I snore.

“I can’t sleep at night,” she complained. “We’ve got to get rid of that noise.”

“Well some of your relatives make a lot of noise and I don’t see you wanting to get rid of them,” I retorted, justifiably but unwisely.

So it came to pass that I found myself one Friday night driving out to a stark-looking single-storey building in a west-end Ottawa suburb, pyjamas and toothbrush in hand, to begin the process of finding a cure for my alleged snoring.

A few weeks earlier my family doctor – also a woman, I might add – had referred my so-called snoring problem to a surgeon who said he could perform an Uvulopalatopharyngoplasty. I was impressed that he could perform it when I couldn’t even pronounce it! I would pay him $1500, in exchange for which I would get a sore throat for a week and absolutely no guarantee that the procedure would put an end to my snoring, if indeed that was my problem.

So The Little Woman gave me two options – the Uvulopalato thingy or a visit to a sleep clinic that was covered by my medical plan and, I reasoned, would prove for once and for all that I didn’t have a snoring problem that needed fixing. Let me see: $1500, surgery, pain, and no guaranteed solution, versus no money down, no surgery, no pain, and most likely proof that I don’t snore.

I chose Door Number Two, which led me to that unlit parking lot in west-end Ottawa, and thence to a little white room that looked like it had been decorated by the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Once I am in my jammies, a humourless guy with a shaved head and a white lab coat -- same shade as the walls of my cell – starts sticking connectors to my scalp, chest, wrists and ankles that he says hook 56 little thin blue wires to his monitoring equipment next door. I pray to God that my doctor hasn’t given me the wrong address and that I am not about to get ten thousand volts of electro-shock therapy.

Igor tells me to sleep tight, shuts the door behind him, and I lie there wide-eyed on my narrow little bed, wired up like a ticking time bomb, staring into the lens of a security camera pointed at me from the opposite wall.

When he opens my door eight hours later, I am in virtually the same position, afraid that any twitch will yank out one of my 56 little blue wires and spoil the results of my sleep clinic analysis. Igor disconnects me, tells me to change into my street clothes, then informs me that I didn’t have enough actual sleep to provide them with any usable data. Maybe I should schedule another appointment.

Thirty minutes later I stumble into our apartment, almost delirious from sleep deprivation, take a pill and topple exhausted into bed for the rest of the weekend, pausing only to apologize in advance to The Little Woman for any sounds that might emanate from my bed.

Fast forward to the present. The Little Woman beams that I am no longer snoring, but I’m not sure that I ever did, and if I am, the sound might be muffled by a plastic mask that covers my face and hooks me up to a machine purring quietly beside our bed.

I was actually able to sleep soundly one entire night at the North Bay Sleep Institute, perhaps because they had a radio in the room and a picture on the wall and a technician who didn’t have her head shaved like Igor.

She told me the next morning that I had momentarily stopped breathing 44 times…

“Well, that’s no so bad,” I said.

“….in one hour,” she added.

My dozens of nightly sleep interruptions – accompanied, according to her, by some gasps and grunts similar to snoring -- resulted in a diagnosis of sleep apnea. One of the mild side-effects of this disorder is that sleepers can stop breathing for anywhere from ten to 30 seconds at a time. The most serious side-effect is not waking up at all.

So my Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine – CPAP for short -- has become my constant companion, quietly keeping my airways open with a steady stream of moisturized air at a reading of 2.5 something-or-others on its little dial. I feel more rested in the mornings, but going to bed wearing the equivalent of a goalie mask took some getting used to.

I woke up with a start in a hotel room in Cobourg one night, all tangled up in my four-foot-long air hose and imagining I was wrestling a python.

So I stubbornly searched for other alternatives to relying on a piece of machinery for a good night’s sleep.

During an appointment with a traditional Native healer, I wondered if he could suggest any powerful herbs or medicine plants that might cure me of my insomnia once and for all.

He paused deep in thought for a moment.

“You oughta get one of those sleep machines,” he said. “My wife’s an awful snorer and it really works for her.”


Maurice Switzer is a citizen of the Mississaugas of Alderville First Nation. He serves as director of communications for the Union of Ontario Indians and editor of the Anishinabek News.