About a year and a half ago I got into a car accident that was jarring, to say the least. Not only did I endure severe whiplash, I also developed some sleep problems that started to interfere with my daily life. I became constantly exhausted and would fall asleep in the middle of class--not even because I stayed up too late because #collegestudent--and I would fall asleep while watching Orange is the New Black (something that had never, ever, happened before). When those issues started popping up I knew that something was wrong, and so I embarked on my journey with the Department of Sleep Medicine at the Mayo Clinic. A long, long journey that is just now wrapping up.
I scheduled a sleep consultation, and after talking to me for ten minutes the doctor immediately put me on a stimulant (that he told me not many people get prescribed #elite) and told me to monitor what happened with that change and come back for an appointment.
After being on the stimulant for a little while I went back with not much change to my, very low, energy levels. This prompted the doctor to suggest that I might be living with narcolepsy and that I should schedule a sleep study. When I heard him suggest a sleep study I went ?? because the only sleep studies I had heard of was my college friends doing them to make a little extra cash money. But, alas, I signed myself up and low-key forgot about it for a few months.
It wasn't until I got a notification that it was time for me to go off of Prozac (for the first time in 2 and a half years, but that's for another blog post) that it became real that I would willingly be spending a night in the doctor's office hooked up to wires. To be honest, I was more excited than I should have been.
Fast forward a month and I was sitting in a not-quite hospital room waiting for my turn to get hooked up to wires. The nurse told me that someone would be in between 7:30 and 8:30 to take me to get hooked up. So I plopped myself down and turned the hospital TV to HGTV and sat there for an hour and a half watching Fixer Upper reruns (nothing bad, obvi) until the clock hit 9.
Once the time on my phone passed 8:45 I, obviously, started frantically texting my parents asking whether or not I had been forgotten? Would I ever be hooked up to wires? Was I in an episode of Stranger Things? Would I survive? They told me to hit the call button at 9, and that, no, I was not in an episode of Stranger Things.
And, so I hit the call button promptly as the clock struck 9 pm. And, of course, the second I hit the call button the door opens and a nurse walks in and tells me that I didn't need to call because he was on his way to get me for the wire setup (I went last because I got there last, which was, in fact, false, for once in my life).
So I followed him down the hallway in my mom's slippers and found myself sitting in a chair reminiscent of the dentist's chair I sat in for an hour getting the plaque on my teeth scraped off earlier in the week with a man securing wires to my hair with straight glue and cold air. I pretended as if I wasn't imagining trying to get the glue out of my hair the next day without creating three new bald spots during the process. Once he was finally done I headed back to my room and watched yet another hour and a half of HGTV (I think I can officially say that I can install a shiplap wall now) until it was time for bed.
And with bed came another four wires and plastic tubes up my nose--the perfect recipe for a good nights sleep, right? We think so.
After waking up the next morning after, apparently, getting 8 and a half hours of sleep (arguable) I repeated that process four times for a nap study and spent my day in a patient lounge by myself--seeing as I was the only patient in the whole building doing a nap study--watching (you guessed it) HGTV. By the fourth nap study (there are two hours between every single one of the four nap studies) I was going stir crazy, hadn't brushed my teeth, and could feel my head start to itch around the glue. When the nurse came in and, finally, told me that I was free from the prison of wires and glue on my head I almost cried tears of joy and practically ran out of the hospital in my mom's slippers.
I figured that, because I went to all that work to find out whether or not I had narcolepsy, I had to have narcolepsy by default. But, pretty much it was just 24 hours of sleeping (and getting more tired from sleeping so much) to hear the news that I do not in fact have narcolepsy.
12/10 recommend getting hooked up to wires for nearly 24 hours and staying in two rooms and not breathing a drop of fresh air for the whole time just to find out that the only thing wrong with you is that you don't have narcolepsy.
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