03
I lie in bed listening to the steady hiss of the CPAP machine. About ten years ago, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. That’s when you stop breathing during sleep so your brain panics and rouses you just enough to get the breathing restarted. Because that mini-awakening happens, you don’t descend into a deep, restorative sleep. After I was tested, I was told I had forty-seven instances an hour, although one sleep tech during one another test told me I kicked lots in my sleep, so that might’ve confused the results. One doctor said it was unusual for me to have a case of sleep apnea at all given my…
02
I lie in bed and feel not only the absence of tiredness, but a seething restlessness. That was something I must’ve felt on some level as a kid. My mum would push the drawers up against the bed because I had a tendency to roll out. But I grew out of it. As a teen, I slept okay most of the time. At thirty, a psychiatrist prescribed me Aropax (aka Paxil) for panic attacks, OCD, and depression. The start-up side effects were debilitating – dizziness, disorientation, stomach aches, insomnia, hot flushes, among other things. Eventually, some of those side effects settled. Some of them. But the Aropax did it’s job…