(Phaysis)

Had a dream the other night. Was sitting down to dinner with a group of people. Someone called for a prayer, and the man at the head of the table began the invocation. I did not bow my head or close my eyes. Neither did the praying man; he was staring right at me.

I hate my dreams.

So the good news is that the doctor found something wrong with me. The bad news is that the treatment is lifelong.

According to the polysomnogram I got last week, I apparently stop breathing when I sleep. Not all through the night, mind you, but only during REM sleep. As soon as REM is over, I’m back to mostly normal. “REM-dependent sleep apnea“, the doctor called it, which means I just don’t sleep very well. How awesome is that?

See, when you’re in REM sleep, your brain is firing most of your neurons in a random fashion; this is necessary for memory, cognition, and sanity. Any interruption of this has negative consequences. During REM, you’re dreaming, and what you experience in your dreams is nothing more than an interpretation of this randomness. We act out in our dreams, but are prevented from actually acting on them. For instance, if the neurons responsible for remembering a childhood fear are triggered, the neurons that enable you to feel fear are triggered in response, and you may get the strong motivation to run away from the imagined threat. So you start running, firing the neurons that tell your legs to pump back and forth. What happens instead is that the nerves at the top of your spinal cord block these running signals and redirect some of them to the muscles in your eyes, effectively paralysing you and preventing you from accidentally killing yourself in your sleep by knocking yourself out of the tree or running off a cliff.

With the exception of your autonomic nervous system (which controls heartrate, breathing, digestion, etc.), every part of you is shut down during REM sleep. Even if your brain wanted to, you would be unable to move until this paralysis wore off. That’s why some people report suddenly waking up and being frozen stiff, unable to move. Stories like this are sometimes accompanied by a vision of a ghost or some other paranormal activity present in the room — an expected after-effect of the suggestibility of dreaming, but propped up by the dreamer as a convenient, though incorrect, explanation. The person is awake, but their nerves from the neck down haven’t caught on.

This paralysis varies with each individual. Some people are able to talk in their sleep, some walk in their sleep, others eat or have sex in their sleep. At this end of the pool, the paralysis isn’t deep enough. On the other end, you have people like me, whose paralysis is so deep that breathing stops frequently throughout the night. There are two sets of muscles that control breathing: the main set is the diaphragm underneath your ribcage for “belly breathing”, and the second is around the ribcage, used for “chest breathing”. During REM, the chest muscles are shut off, since they’re not part of the autonomic nervous system, so your only way to breathe is your automatic diaphragm motions.

With me, the diaphragm isn’t enough, so it either struggles to pull in air or just doesn’t move at all. The extra weight I carry on my belly is a contributing factor, as is my sleeping position (worse when I’m on my back). And so what happens if I’m not breathing? My blood-oxygen level drops. According to my sleep study, during these REM episodes it drops to as low as 60% O2 saturation. And so my adrenal system goes into panic mode, makes my heart pump more to keep O2 levels up, and my dream gets really intense and panicked, causing me to wake up just enough to start breathing again. The immediate result is disruption of necessary REM sleep. The intermediate result is a really bad night of sleep. The long-term result ranges from loss of concentration, bad memory, weight gain, all the way up to increased risk of diabetes and early-onset heart disease. All the stuff that comes from lack of sleep and a high-stress lifestyle.

No wonder I feel crappy in the morning, can’t focus, and can’t remember important stuff ever. FML.

So what’s the treatment? Sleeping with a CPAP machine. How cool is that? I get to sleep with an air hose jockstrapped to my face for the rest of my life. Fucking awesome.

The doc is having me come in next week to do another sleep study to determine just how much air pressure I actually need. “Titration”, it’s called. Then I’ll come back again to get set up with a machine of my very own (joy joy), and then a final checkup a month later to gauge my improvement. I feel my youth slipping away as I type.

So, it feels like my days of going to the submarine races are drawing to an end. I’ll be snorkeling in the shallows for the rest of my life.

“Would you like to go grab a filling but stomach-annoyingly spicy meal for a high price, followed by a wet drive to and a muddy parking at an overcrowded neighborhood coffee shop for some mediocre but hot coffee and pitifully poor wireless internet access?”

“Sure.”

It is a sunday. The UT students are back. It is raining; not the heavy rain that breeds excitement, but the light “well, I think I’ll rain…nah, hold on…would you settle for some drizzles on your glasses?” kind of rain. The kind of rain that clings to your side windows and obscures your vision when you’re trying to pull out into traffic. The kind of rain that falls from clouds that just stay all day, obscuring the sun and chilling the ground. The kind of rain that breeds mold.

It is a sunday.

I slept for something resembling 10 hours. It wasn’t a spectacular kind of sleep. It just hung there and lingered. The dreams and fantasies dragged on while my twisted backbone generated enough pain to make the dreams not worth the alpha waves. As I sit here 5 hours after waking up and after a hot shower, some stretching, and a warm meal, my back is still hurting. It’s times like this that I wish I had a drug habit.

There is this guy here at this coffee house who I don’t think I like. I’ve never met the guy. Don’t even know his name. But I don’t like him. Two months ago I was sitting at Spiderhouse, another coffeeshop, with an old friend of mine; she was giving me the lowdown on one of her ex-boyfriends who disappeared from her life and then reappeared at Spiderhouse that night to do the “I don’t see you, you don’t exist” thing at her. She pointed him out to show me who he was as he was about to walk by. He saw me looking at him and nailed his eyes back at me as he kept walking by, like he was saying, “You got a problem, fuckhead?” But I didn’t look away. For once, I didn’t look away. And now that guy is here, at Flightpath.

I shouldn’t feel anything about the whole thing. I shouldn’t. But I do. It was a glare, a daring glare. The kind of glare that communicates with the Animal Urge underneath. He’s nothing to me. I’m nothing to him. And I have this fear/anger motivation. My friends that night, when I mentioned the exchange, said, “Dude, it’s nothing. Just let it go. Don’t let it get to you.” This is the kind of thing that happens on 6th street downtown. A stare is an offense punishable by an asskicking. But nothing happened. Nothing has happened. And I’m a fool for holding onto it.

Fuck.

It is a sunday. Hello.

The past two or so weeks have driven me kinda nuts. Three weeks ago I started coming down with a cold; the whole ears/sinus/throat thing. Well, it went away after an evening, and a few days later I went out to eat; had a meal with some chips and salsa. The salsa irritated my throat which started swelling up. This, of course, broke down the defenses enough to let whatever was waiting in the wings to come in and give me a full-on infection. I had a cold. Lacking the desire to go anywhere or do anything, and wracked with morals that prevented me from spreading my cold to others, I stayed at home for a week at a half. I went to work like normal, but I had to take a day off after the doctor visit because I was too ill to work. And now I’m finally getting well enough to go out; I’m still sniffling, and my chest tightens up every now and then. I’m at 80%, but that’s it.

I hate the cold, damp weather of mid-winter in central Texas.

My time spent on IRC these days is less than stellar. Each day that passes shows me that I’m not cut from the same cloth as most of the people in the one IRC channel I frequent. There are a few people I revere; the rest can rot away, I don’t mind. It is in IRC that I keep getting proven, day after day, that it’s just not worth speaking up or having discussion because someone, thanks to remoteness and anonymity, will fire off an insult or two and make my attempt at carrying a point across worth nothing. It seems the laws of the street apply online as well.

So should I give up on IRC as well, as I’ve given up on other things in the past year, or should I hold on or join other channels? This sounds so stupid. But this is the level my life is at these days. Debating my presence on IRC. Screwit. When the balance between the benefits of chatting with other people and having a good laugh is outweighed by swagger, bravado, attitudes, and insults, it is time to move on.

The balance is tipping.

Took care of some minor yet ongoing business today. Started the day off a little too early, not enough sleep after going to bed so late last night. So, I took my time waking up and getting started. Even went back down for a nap, just some time alone in my warm bed, the grey light of the rainy day seeping in through the blinds. I got up around 3 o’clock.

It’s interesting to me, after living for three and a half years in Austin, that I still get surprised when I walk into a business where only one person speaks English. Suddenly, my knowledge of Spanish is out the door, and I find myself making my words long and drawn out as if I was speaking to retards. One of my stops this afternoon was to a tire shop to get a rim for my full-sized spare tire; the place was two miles from my apartment, and I knew they’d be open today. After visiting that shop, I have a new idea of what day-to-day business is like in Mexico.

The next stop was the laundromat to start a wash of whites; nothing like having to wear stuff from the “emergency pile”. So, on the way, I picked up a new box of detergent and some Febreze for the house. Started my load and took my car to the shop next door to the laundromat to get my oil changed. Stop three. Finished before the wash cycle ended.

Back at the laundromat, I started the dry cycle and left for another stop: lunch. Small meal: chicken quesadilla, taco. Watched some crazy chick run up to the trashcan next to the restaurant and start frantically rummaging for empty cups. Seems the insane people are out in droves these days. Weather’s warming up. This spring’s going to be interesting. Lunch done, back to the clothes, then back to the house.

Spent some time working on my little DOS-mode gaming PC. My old P133 computer; got it outfitted with 32 megs of RAM, a 2.1 GB drive, cdrom. After dealing with MS-DOS 6.22, I completely remember what it is that I now take for granted in the newer Microsoft operating systems. But, I have it set up; wish I could easily configure my sound card so I could hear my games, but ah well. That’s down the road. Played some Duke Nukem 1, some Dragon’s Lair (the CDRom edition with video captures from the original laserdisc), and some Magic Carpet. After dealing with high-resolution displays and powerful graphics cards over the years, it’s humbling that at one time I considered those low-res games as being clear, crisp, and high-quality. Now it’s like I’m watching a television through muzlin cloth.

So, now I’m here at the coffee shop. Same place as last night. Same plans as last night. Working on Chrontium. It’s turning out quite nicely; getting better with each chunk of code written. Spending time rewriting, optimizing, and testing; last night was highly productive. As long as I can keep busy with the code without my usual distractions, it’ll get done.

Burning the midnight oil a lot these days. So little to do, so much time. :sighs:

Starting to get mighty warm around here. Nothing like good heat and dense humidity. Mmmm. Makes opening my car door that much more pleasant. I swear, I gotta start cracking the windows or something to equalize the humidity. Sheesh.

I’ve been finding myself doing more programming lately. It’s now again starting to become fun, like a puzzle I do. The drill is simple: create a problem (if one doesn’t already pop-up while solving another problem), and write code to fix it. Some people have their crosswords, I have my programs. My current puzzle is trying to split and parse an SQL insert statement. I want to split off all the flag keywords and parse the remainder of the statement in any of the three standard ANSI SQL formats. I’ve been running into problems having my code differentiate between column text and actual column names. Currently, though, I think I’m on my way to getting this problem licked — I wrote a small finite-state automaton (a smart loop — a bot, basically) that steps through the statement, one character at a time, and tests that character against a small nested list of rules. To me, this is exciting stuff. So far, with a few logic problems aside, I think I really do have it beat. I hope so, anyway.

I want to thank each and every one of you who extended sympathies and shared in my anger at what happened to me a few days ago (as eloquently described in the last entry). You folks are indeed my good friends. Thanks.

:yawn: Ok. My eyes are getting droopy. Nothing like the cumulative effect of getting less than four hours of sleep a night for the past 4 evenings. I decided to head home early tonight, and that was the most perfect choice.

Gotta take better care of myself. You should do the same. G’nite!