Beyond the Wall of Sleep
Some of you may be wondering why I’ve chosen La vie sous la mer as the title for my third Jamendo album. There are many reasons for choosing “life under the sea.”
Certainly, it is a metaphor, especially for emotion. However, a deeper level of meaning comes from the artwork I’ve chosen for the cover, a mermaid drawn by a former student of mine.
Mermaids span two worlds — land and water. Like the mermaid, I also span two worlds — science and music. Look further: I am also biracial (American Indian and white). So the mermaid theme definitely holds an attraction for me.
However, there’s one really big factor I haven’t mentioned yet.
The sea is also death. For the past year, I feel like I have been drowning. La vie sous la mer, “life under the sea,” for me is that feeling of sinking downward and watching the last rays of the surface world dwindle away to a faint blue glow.
Last night I finally found an explanation, and a possible solution.
The clue was my sudden onset, two months ago, of high blood pressure (I wrote about it on my Dandelife blog a month ago). I went to my doctor, and while discussing my symptoms (always being tired, waking without feeling rested, etc.), he suddenly asked, out of nowhere, “Is your wife complaining about your snoring?”
Up until that point, the subject hadn’t even been brought up. But yes, for the past year, the snoring problem had been getting worse.
See, I thought being tired all the time, snoring, and having high blood pressure were just the general gripes you got for being an old geezer. Now, back up a minute — I’m 38, the same age as Neil Armstrong when he landed on the Moon. 38 isn’t so bad.
But I feel like I’m 98 most of the time.
See what I meant about drowning? Imagine every day a struggle to dogpaddle, tread water, and hug the surface. You’d get exhausted pretty quickly.
My doctor sent me to a pulmonary specialist named Dr. Greenberg. Last night, I stayed overnight at the hospital for a sleep study. They wired me up to a bunch of machines that monitored my brainwaves, heart rate, blood oxygen, etc.
And they found it:
And apparently, for me, it happens the most during REM sleep — exactly when it can do the most harm.
I go back for another study next week, on Monday. I’ve been feeling like a drowning man for the last year; could this be the life preserver?
[This article was crossposted to my Dandelife blog.]
Hey, good for you! I’m a respiratory therapist and until I went to RT school I had no idea how widespread sleep apnea is and how even children can get it. Congrats on going and on coming to grips with the problem. I have a few friends that no matter how much I lecture
they refuse to wear their CPAPS after being diagnosed but they don’t seem to get sleep apnea is not about convenience and most people do adapt. Sleep apnea puts so much extra work on the heart and lungs that it greater heightens your risk for heart disease and list of others. Sincerely congratulations on seeking and finding help!
Glenna, thank you for your reply. This morning, the scary bit was that they said if they got enough data, they’d go ahead and try the CPAP on me. It never happened.
Great, I thought, another lead lost, another false hope. I figured of all nights, it had somehow just not happened last night, and I’d remain without any sort of solution for the problem.
Instead, the doctor came in this morning and told me about my results. I guess most people would be upset, but I was relieved. My wife has a problem, a mysterious allergy that no one can seem to diagnose or fix; I thought I was in the same boat, with some mystery ailment no one could help me with.
Maybe I’ll go to sleep looking like Darth Vader, but hopefully, I’ll stop acting like him in the middle of the day