Acquainted with the Night by Christopher Dewdney

Author:Christopher Dewdney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

A few weeks later, on a late November afternoon, I went back to meet with Dr. Hanly, the head of the sleep laboratory, to review my charts. A receptionist pointed me toward a small examination room, and after I sat down and looked around the room, I realized I was a little nervous. What if, by some bizarre coincidence, I had severe sleep apnea or unusually loud snoring! I didn't have to wait long before Dr. Hanly entered the room. He was a tall, precise man in his late forties with graying hair and a slightly distanced demeanor. He had an intern with him and asked if I minded having the intern there and I told him I didn't.

Dr. Hanly listened to my breathing with a stethoscope and measured my blood pressure, both of which were, apparently, normal. Then he asked me to stand up and open my mouth wide. He looked into my throat. He got the intern to look also. "See, perfectly normal," he remarked to the intern, to my private relief. Then he asked me to sit down, and we went over the data from the sleep clinic. He asked me how long I thought I'd slept and I replied, "One, maybe two hours." I was surprised when he said, gesturing at his sheaf of computer printouts and charts, that I had slept for three and a half hours.

He then told me that I had exhibited some symptoms of minor sleep apnea. I was shocked. Like most sleepers, I'm not even aware that I snore, even though I've been told that I do. I asked him if my apnea was serious and he reassured me that my oxygen levels never dropped below normal (the image of the glowing red E.T. finger came back to me) and that I wouldn't need any treatment at all, not even the jaw-adjusting prosthetic device that he sometimes recommends for minor apnea.

After that he went over the rest of the charts, which were completely normal except for one spike that he pointed out with a pen. "See that?" he asked. What now? I thought. "This is a transient peak of sixty decibels," he said, "a little high, but otherwise your snoring is well below the antisocial range." (According to the Guinness Book of Records, Mel Switzer, an Englishman from southern Britain, has the loudest snore ever recorded. It has been measured at ninety-two decibels, equivalent to a big motorcycle starting up from a distance of two feet. His wife, conveniently, is deaf in one ear.)

I thanked him for his time and, after shaking hands once again, I left the room and went to the elevator. I thought about the unexpected diagnosis, which seemed like a bad thing, and the fact that it didn't require any treatment, which seemed like a good thing, with the requisite ambivalence. From the research that I'd done for this book, I knew that apnea could be serious, that it could cause exhaustion and heart disease. Yet Dr.

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