Why Sleep is Important to Your Health... and My Experience at a Sleep Clinic

Ok, so obviously there's a crazy picture of me with a bunch of wires hooked up to the right from when I recently went to a sleep clinic and got a Polysomnogram, but I'll get back to that...

Getting the right amount of sleep is a lot more important than most people may think. Some problems associated with chronic untreated sleep disorders are: high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, obesity, depression, etc. One study even found that reduced sleep time has a greater mortality risk than smoking, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Given all of these problems from sleep deprivation, hopefully my description of my experience going to a sleep clinic will result in some people trying it out and getting the treatment they need.

Back to my story... for the past 5-10 years, I've had issues sleeping compared to other people around me. On an average night, I'll go to bed around 11pm, get up at 2am, be up for about 1.5hrs, go back to bed, and be up by 6am. About 5 days/month in a row, it's worse, and I'm up about 3 times for an hour each time and finally get pissed off around 5am and just get up for the day. I've tried the whole laying in bed and trying to go back to sleep thing but that always leads to less sleep. I'm also extremely tired by about 4pm (which sucks when meetings go until 5:30...), and have a hard time driving more than an hour without almost falling asleep (which I actually did once when I was 18... flipped my car a couple times, and almost died). So finally my doctor referred me to a sleep clinic... I called and set up an appointment.

For my initial appointment, I had to fill out a bunch of papers about my sleeping patterns and just talked to a doctor for half an hour... not too exciting. I set up the appointment for my overnight assessment to get a Polysomnogram (I had no idea what was going to go on at this point... I don't really ask questions). I showed up to the sleep place around 6:30pm, which kind of looked like a cross between a hotel and a doctor's office. One of the techs on duty gave me a tour and there are about 6 separate bedrooms with patients occupying all of them, a couple bathrooms with towels, shampoo, showers, and also a snack / breakfast area with fruit, oatmeal, cereal, and a bunch of other free stuff. I got sent to my private room with a queen sized memory foam mattress and a flat panel TV... pretty sweet. This is also when I noticed the security camera that would be staring at me all night on the ceiling, and also some other medical equipment I figured would probably be hooked up to me later.

After a while, the tech came in after I was in my jammies and told me he was going to start putting the electrodes on me. He explained everything, put some wires on my legs, chest, and face with some sticky patches, along with 2 stretchy bands around my waist and chest. At this point, he was going to start placing electrodes on my head that are used to measure what sleep state you're in. He had to measure my head, mark it with a red grease pencil where each electrode would be placed. It felt like there was a million, but I think it was probably about 20. Each location needed to be cleaned with a q-tip with some stuff on it, and sometimes it felt like he was rubbing pretty hard, but I think that was needed for the electrodes to work correctly. The electrodes were put on with what he called model airplane glue (yeah, don't think your hair is going to look pretty after this... ). This whole process took about an hour, but when they're monitoring all of your brain activity, your breathing, your leg movements, etc, I guess it takes a while to prep for that :). I went back to my room to watch the Bachelor, of course.

The tech said he would come back in around 10:30pm and I should have brushed my teeth and anything else I needed to do because I will be hooked up all night. Although, if I needed anything, like to go to the bathroom, I could just ask him if he could unhook me....since he would be listening to and staring at me all night through another camera thing next to the bed. Awesome, he's going to listen to me snoring with my mouth open all night... He hooked the thing up that I have in my hand in the picture to a machine, and taped a tube onto my face with one part going into my nose and the other part going into my mouth.

At this point, I asked him... how am I going to sleep with all this stuff! He responded with "everyone says that, but everyone end up sleeping...". So it took me about an hour to fall asleep because I always sleep on my stomach and couldn't, but I did fall asleep with all that stuff on, and you kind of forget about most of it after a while. I woke up around 2am, the normal time, stared off into space, and after about 45 min decided that I do need to get up, but felt awkward being like... helloooo, are you there? So I just stared at the camera thing until the guy asked me if I needed anything...haha. He came in and unhooked me, and I walked around for a while, ate a couple bites of a granola bar, and went back into the room. I really wanted to go to my own house at this point, but he made me try to go back to bed to finish the study.

I ended up sleeping until about 5am and he came in at 6am to unhook me and take all the stuff off. It only took about 10 minutes to get everything off and now I had globs of glue in my hair... sexy for work. He gave me a couple bottles of this oil stuff that was supposed to help get it all out, so I worked that into my hair for about 15 minutes in the shower, and got most of it out and went to work. I told everyone not to pay attention to any globs of glue that may be falling off my head that day. By the next wash it was all out.

So that was how everything went, and I have my follow up appointment this Thursday, so I'm really excited to see if there's anything wrong with me, or if I'm just crazy :). All in all, I think it will all be worth it. They really try as hard as they can to make you feel comfortable given the situation with the bed, TV, and free continental breakfast, but obviously it's not going to be like your own home. In the long run, it's only 1 night, and it could change your life. The doctor told me almost all sleep disorders can be treated...so hey, why not. At least you know what to expect now...

For a lot more info on sleeping, go to WebMD... they have a huge section on it.