Well here it is, the day of my hospital nap… OF SCIENCE, and I have nothing particularly on my mind that I want to write about. I am feeling lazy and self-indulgent, and finding it hard to concentrate on any one thing for all that long. It’s a nice sunny day out, and I am feeling silly.

Plus, I have this infection under the fingernail of one of my primary typing fingers, the one between the middle finger and the thumb of my right hand, and that is making typing a little painful. Also using the mouse, as that just happens to be my primary clicking finger. Talk about hurting me where I live.

So that has thrown me off a little. But what the hell, the doctor will take care of it when I see him on Tuesday, and until then I can shift my typing a little and try to both type with less force (and therefore less pain) and favour the middle finger a little more.

I could theoretically also move the mouse to the other side of my monitor and use my left hand for mousing. I have used both hands to mouse at various times. But it is always painful and awkward to switch and it doesn’t seem worth it just for a temporary illness.

I will just muddle through somehow.

As predicted, I am no longer super sleepy. I got that out of my system yesterday. I feel kind of lazy, but that is nowhere near being the same thing as my periods of hypersomnia. Usually, this kind of laziness merely result in taking an unusual amount of pleasure in lying in bed, just daydreaming, or sleeping very very lightly.

And seeing as I will be lying around in bed for science (well, and my own personal health… mostly that, actually) tonight, I supposed being in the sort of mood where that is enjoyable is a good thing.

A lot of little thoughts run through my head in anticipation. Will I be in a private room? I sure as hell hope so. This is supposed to be as much like my “normal” sleep as possible, and I do not usually have one to three other people in my room with me, with only curtains for privacy.

Worse would have to be trying to sleep on the ward. I am being admitted through Emergency, and that conjures up visions of having to try to sleep not just covered in sensors but in the loud, cold, scary, depressing, and weird-smelling emergency room.

I have never been admitted to Richmond Hospital proper before, but I have had to go to emergency there a couple of times and like must emergency rooms, it is not a nice or fun place in any way.

So hopefully, I will not end up trying to sleep there. A “semi-private” (to me, that’s like being semi-pregnant… it’s private, or it isn’t) room would be okay, as long as my roommates are not loud or otherwise disruptive. If I am lucky, this will be one of those random lulls in hospital demand and I won’t have to worry much about other patients.

Another little worry : if I am going to be covered in sensors and possibly have tubes stuck places, how the heck do I get up to use the bathroom? At home, I go pee like five times a day. There is no chance I will be able to go all the time between 8:30 pm to possibly 7 am without needing to take a leak at least twice. So uh… how do I get up and go wee?

I get a terrible feeling that the answer is that I do not. I will be expected to make use of a bedpan, something I have avoided entirely in my life up to this point. Even when I had to spend ten days in hospital after my gall bladder operation, by far my longest hospital stay since I was born, I managed to avoid using the bedpan. I made it to the bathroom somehow, or held it in till I could. I have very strong feelings about bathroom dignity (I don’t even use urinals, for God’s sake) and I refuse to use a bedpan unless there is literally no other possible choice.

But if they have mt all covered in a million sticky sensor pads, all of which are wired into a console of some sort, then they are not exactly going to want to take them all off me just so I can go have a pee and then do them all back up when I get back, are they?

And the only alternative to the bedpan in that case is the catheter, and while, like I mentioned, I have been there before, I would really rather not go there again.

So I may have to finally surrender to the bedpan. I hoped to go my whole life without having to do so, but if it’s bedpan or catheter, I guess I will have to go bedpan.

Honestly, I would rather just pee in a bottle. Seems slightly more dignified.

But whatever. Whatever happens, happens. It’s just one night of my life, less then twelve hours, and when it’s done, it’s done, and I will have some anecdotes and some memories and hopefully some medically useful information added to my medical files.

Apparently, the province has stopped paying for CPAP machines, so even if my sleep apnea is clinically confirmed, I have no idea what will be done about it.

As far as I know, CPAP and other related tech are the only treatment that works for sleep apnea. Even the surgical techniques of the past had only limited success. There is no pill or brace or dental device that can keep your airways open when you sleep if you are a fattie like me.

So it might be that the takeaway from all this medical monitoring is simply “Yup. You got sleep apnea. Sucks to be you, pal!”

But whatever. Wish me well, folks!

Had another of my deep down dark dreamtime sleepy days today.

I judge that I have spent 16 of the last 20 hours asleep, roughly. As usual when I am going through one of these period, I am only able to stay awake long enough to eat, hydrate, and eliminate, and then it’s right back to the bottom of the cold black ocean to drown in my dreams for another little while.

Still, I knew it was coming, so it didn’t come as a surprise. I knew I had not been sleeping very well lately, getting only shallow and unsatisfying sleep when I did manage to actual catch a wink or ten. Obviously, there’s only so long that can go on before the Sleep Bank forecloses on your sleep debt and you have to pay the balance in full before you can do anything else.

As usual in these scenarios, caffeine is implicated somewhere along the line. I have been drinking Diet Coke with my nightly popcorn lately, and no doubt that propped up the low-sleep part of the cycle past its usual crash terminus and insured that today’s crash would be a spectacular one.

But I am not complaining. This is just how my life works. I am glad it happened on a day when I had absolutely nothing planned and nothing that needed doing. So there was no stress. Just lots of sleep and lots of dreams and the occasional islands of consciousness upon which to rest and resupply.

I am pretty sure that I am out of the woods now, or at least within sight of the end of the path. I have developed a feeling for what is going on during these periods, a sense of how much of the candle is left to burn. (Boy, I switch metaphors a lot, don’t I?)

And this internal sense tells me I have discharged most of the sleep debt. From this point on, I will likely get some more normal sleep (a rare thing with me) and then the clock will be reset and it will all start again.

There’s an outside chance that I am just between sessions. It has happened before. I have thought I was out of the woods and found out it was just an exceptionally large clearing. But I doubt it.

And speaking of sleep, the next thing on my tiny agenda is that sleep study thing.

Thursday night, I will be checking myself into Richmond Hospital for a full night sleep study. Not sure exactly what that means, but presumably, I will be checked into the hospital, covered in various kinds of sensor, and then be expected to take a nice clinically typical nap.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

I am fairly nervous about it. I don’t like being in hospital. It’s too far from my usual sources of comfort, and such a cold and uncaring place for the most part. I have occasionally entertained Munchausen’s Syndrome fantasies of how nice it would be to be in the hospital and have all your basic needs taken care of for you and be absolutely free from all sense of expectation that you will do something with your life.

I mean, give the guy a break, he’s been in the hospital!

But in reality, I would likely hate it too much to enjoy it. It would just be too damned boring. There is only so much time I can spend reading and doing crossword puzzles and napping before I just cannot stand it any more and I have to do something else.

And while this might sound odd coming from a guy who spends his entire life either in his bed, in front of his computer, or watching TV, I really can’t stand to be in one place for too long. And that does triple if that place is my bed. There is a reason why I spend my day in three places and not just one. If I really wanted to do so, I could no doubt centralize everything around my bed. Get my own TV and Wii, install those and my computer within reach of my bed, and have a perfectly sedentary, oral retentive heaven lifestyle.

But the idea disgusts me, to be honest. Moving around the apartment might not count much in terms of exercise, but it is way better than nothing. I already face the problem of developing this weird sort of antipathy to my own bed on a periodic basis. Hence my fantasies of living in a hotel and having fresh bedding whenever I want it. In fact, in many ways, the hotel fantasy is like a swankier and more indulgent version of the hospital fantasy. Way more expensive but with far more dignity and comfort than being in some crummy hospital bed.

Oh well, some day, I hope.

Also making me nervous is that I am supposed to have two forms of ID when I show up, and I don’t even have 1. This is becoming a real problem, and I am going to have to find some way to get some cash together so I can get a new CareCard and BCID. I had to attend VancouFur with a badge that said “underage” (opposite of an overage) on it because of my lack of picture ID.

Plus, there is a distinct feeling of existential incompleteness in lacking proper ID. Like on some abstract but deeply personal level, you don’t quite exist. Or at least, you can’t prove it.

So I suppose there is a small chance that I will show up without the proper ID and they will just plain turn me away. I would be both disappointed and relieved. Disappointed, because I want to get this done and it took like four months to get the appointment in the first place, but relieved, cause I could just go the hell home and sleep like a normal person.

So we will see what happens tomorrow. I will bundle up my clothes, my dying laptop, some books, and head off to the hospital.

I am trying to think of it as more of an adventure than an imposition.