A Nice Dinner Might Have Helped . . .

Oh, the indignities just continue to pile up, one after another. I never used to believe in reincarnation, but now I do. And I am convinved that, in my last life, I was a Brooklyn cab driver, and am being punished for that in this life.

If you don't know why I am picking on cab drivers from Brooklyn, specifically, or New York City, in general, then you need to get out more.

Anyway, last night I showed up at the medical arts building for the long-awaited "sleep study" that my doctors wanted me to take. In the middle of a blizzard. Where the local authorities were doing the kind of street plowing that got Mayor Bilandic fired in Chicago back in 1978. After getting caught behind an 18-wheeler that had gotten stuck in the middle of the road - and no, don't ask me how something that big and that heavy can get stuck in two inches of snow. Maybe after you add in the other five inches that fell while I was not sleeping in the sleep centre, but I digress.

Now, if you've never had to undergo one of these "sleep studies" - an exercise in a self-fulfilling prophecy designed to tell you that you suffer from sleep apnea - then you have missed out on a truly joyful experience. Really. It's a lot like spending a night in a budget motel, onl without any of the amenities.

Okay, first of all, they make you go in the back door of the building, presumably because they tell you to show up at 8:30 PM, and the main entrance is closed. Or, perhaps, it's because they just make the Irish use the back door - some people are just funny that way.

Actually, the room they put you in is fairly nice - if, of course, you can ignore all the chain-saw snoring emanating from the other rooms. There's a nice leather chair, a queen-size bed, a nice armoire to stash your belongings in, and a 50-inch flat-panel LCD TV mounted on the wall, complete with satellite access and, erm, the porn channels. Quite aside from the, ah, adult selections available, such a nice TV set does seem to be a bit of a waste, since you're not actually given an opportunity to watch anything. You are, after all, there to sleep.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about the ceiling-mounted IR camera, so the nurses can watch you. Note to self: don't pick your nose or play with yourself.

So, after you change into whatever it is you like to sleep in - and for God's sake, let's hope that camera is off while you're changing - the nurse comes in to hook you up to what you can only presume are some very expensive machines. And, yes, while we're at it, I did toy with the idea of telling them that I slept in the nude, but I actually don't advise doing that. You never can tell what might show up on YouTube.

They get the ball rolling, so to speak, with something that felt very much like a phrenological exam (oh, go look it up). The nurse had me sit in a chair, and then she broke out a tape measure and started measuring my head. She said it was so she would know where to put the EEG leads, but I would have thought they'd have a standardized chart for that. Oh, well. Then, she started drawing dots and lines all over my skull and forehead with a red magic marker. Again, she said, so she would know where to place the leads, but it did kind of feel like she was just playing tic-tac-toe, though I could just be reading things into it.

Then came the goop. Like she dumped an industrial-sized jar of K-Y Jelly on my head. A nice, big, heaping dollop for every lead. And by "dollop," I mean that when she was done, I looked like the victim of a bukkake party. Once again, if you don't know what a bukkake party is, you need to get out more. All I know is that two showers later, I've still got this gunk in my hair.

Once she got done spewing my head, the Great Electrode Placement occurred. This was really fun, because it took about ten minutes to get all the leads placed - head, chest, back, arms and legs. During this process, I somehow felt compelled to ask if the Governor had called yet to commute my sentence. All of these leads, of course, are connected to a set of machines on a night table so, after you're wired, if you have to do something like, oh, go to the bathroom, they have to come in and disconnect you and plug you into a box you can walk around with. Trust me, not a process for those of you who are weak of bladder . . .

When they've finally gotten you all hooked up, it's time for bed. The mattress, of course, is like a slab of cement. Sleep-number, my ass. What I discovered is that you can pick up the controller for the mattress, pick the firmness number you want, and all the bed does is, well, fart. And the mattress remains just as firm as ever. Look, I set the damned thing all the way down to 50, and it was still like lying on a slab of concrete, no matter how many times I made the mattress fart.

Oh, by the way, that's something else you probably don't want to do. They are listening to you, remember.

Then there are the pillows, which are so good it's like sleeping with no pillows at all. I had two of them, and those suckers must have compressed completely flat as soon as my head hit them. Or, perhaps, with all the petroleum jelly on my head, I just kept slipping off them. I suppose that's a possibility, too. All I know for sure is that I haven't seen that much grease on a pillow case since I was a teenager. Ah, memories . . . The good news is that once you are finally all settled in bed, the nurse tucks you in, which no one has done for me since I was about six.

Note to Centegra Health Systems, Inc.: if you actually wanted me to sleep, you shouldn't have given me a cute nurse with large breasts who was willing to crawl into bed with me.

Not that I actually did much sleeping, but at one point it seems that one of the leads came off my back, and I was rather pleasantly awakened - or unpleasantly, depending on personal preference or embarrassment factor - to my nurse crawling under the covers and looking for it. When she asked if there was anything else I could think of to ask for, I was truly at a loss for words. Okay, maybe not so much as at a loss for words, but the classic problem of which voice to listen to, the angel on my right shoulder or the devil on my left. But I did periodically make sure to knock a lead loose here and there . . .

But as I said, at least for me, there really wasn't a whole lot of sleeping involved in this "sleep study." Look, I got there at 8:30 PM and, by the time all the preliminaries were over and they made me look like an x-rated movie actor ready for execution, it was 11:30 PM. By the time I was stretched out on the flatulent cement slab, it was midnight and I still wasn't tired. So, they gave me a sleeping pill . . . which didn't work. Which kind of defeats the point of a sleeping pill, but what do I know? Between midnight and about 4:00 AM, all I did was kind of drift in and out of a sort of half-sleep. You know, that really restful kind where you sleep for a couple of minutes before waking up, all the time aware of everything that's going on around you. Rinse and repeat as often as necessary.

Finally, at about four in the morning, I finally fell into what you can properly classify as "sleep." The problem being that they wake you up at 5:00 AM and kick you out. Surprise! The. Most. Miserable. Night. Ever. And then, on basically one hour's sleep, I got to drive home in the same freaking blizzard that had plagued me the night before. Note to Chevy: the HHR is really not designed to be driven in the snow.

And you know what? I'm going to get to do this all over again, because according to the nurse, I have severe sleep apnea. Which means that they're going to make me do another "sleep study" so they can either fit me with one of those funky masks they use to treat apnea at home, or decide if maybe I should have the "corrective" surgery. Of course, my failure to sleep adequately could have nothing to do with the rock-hard mattress or, perhaps, that same nurse causing random erections by getting into bed with me, but that just shows my failure to understand the problem. I mean, I'm not the one who spent four years in medical school and three years in residency so I could watch tapes of people sleeping, right?

Really, now, the only thing I learned from this experience is that I really want a 50-inch flat-panel LCD TV, and a bed that doesn't fart . . .