rowyn

One of my kids' and niblings' favourite nursery rhymes is "Hole At The Bottom Of The Sea," a very simple song where you progressively embellish a scene while trying to maintain the original timing. By the end you're singing, "There's a hair on the wart on the frog on the bump on the log in the hole at the bottom of the sea," but with all the spaces removed from between the words.

I feel that way about my newly-acquired CPAP machine. Breathe through your nose. Breathe through your nose even though you've been working with an alternating one half of one nostril most of your life. Breathe through your nose with one nostril in your sleep. Do this in a bridle for humans that terminates in a little silicone mask over your nose, attached to a hose, so that you look like deranged elephant cosplay. Try to keep your mouth shut while you sleep. Wake up with your mouth open and air going in every direction at once. Wake up in the middle of a "rescue" cycle with air pressure so high breathing OUT feels like trying to swallow around an inflated balloon animal in your throat.

Do all these things in the hope your heart/brain doesn't explode decades early and that, one day, when you've adapted to wearing the damn thing, you'll sleep better and wake up feeling something other than exhausted.

I was really hoping to pass the sleep test and be told I was just fighting a touch of the ol' depression and/or needed to get serious about keeping my phone out of my bedroom. This is a lot to get used to.

It's not all bad. The whole nose-breathing business is much easier with a constant flow of warm humidified air. I'm used to waking up with such a sore throat and such a dry, vile-tasting mouth, and with the CPAP I don't - even when my mouth does fall open, the incredibly bizarre air-gargling sensation means I wake up and fix it pretty fast. And I've started dreaming more often and more vividly again.

I spent a little time being a pathetic weenie about how the elephant-bridle rig is not sexy, then got the fuck over myself. You're meant to wear it while unconscious. You don't need to be sexy when you're unconscious. And you know what else isn't sexy: having a fucking stroke. I didn't even need to run this line of thinking past anyone else; it was pretty obvious all on its own. Also? The machine is basically silent other than the quiet movement of the air itself. It's like ASMR Darth Vader. Not that bad at all, even for someone else in the bed having to listen to it.

I definitely have a renewed interest in tiring myself out as much as I can before bed, which was always my sleep silver bullet anyway, even before I had the added incentive of needing some extra exhaustion to drag me down past the plane of fiddly mask concerns. Tonight, for example, I'm hoping will go well because I just planted my garden for the year. There was a school fundraiser for seedlings, and I purchased a flat of vegetables, a flat of herbs, and a hanging basket of strawberries. We'll see how much I can keep alive, let alone productive, but it is pretty fun to have an instant garden so soon before the traditional SEED-planting date of the May long weekend!