My doctor called yesterday with the results from my exciting night at the sleep clinic, and, man, did he have some disturbing/not-at-all surprising news for me. According to my data, I have "severe" sleep problems, to which I say, "DUH." I don't have sleep apnea, which I figured, since I don't snore, making me an excellent travel companion; remember that should you plan any trips to Belize or Honduras in the near future. Anyway, my doctor threw so many numbers my way and I couldn't write them down fast enough; I did, though, manage to retain a couple fun facts:
- My sleep is highly fragmented. I averaged 19 arousals per hour, with 241 total brief arousals.
- I woke up several other times, too -- about 300 times in all over the course of the night.
- It took me 119 minutes to fall into REM sleep; 61:40 is the normal amount of time to get to this stage of sleep.
- I spent about 13 minutes in REM sleep. The norrmal time for adults is 90 to 120 minutes.
After quickly sharing my data, my doctor concluded, "Well, it's no wonder that you feel tired all the time -- you're not sleeping!"
Shit. You don't say.
Doctor Obvious said I need to go in for a follow-up with the sleep doctor; the earliest I can get in is three days before I move back to Florida, in mid-October. The cause of my insomnia could be the particular prescription drug(s) I'm taking or possibly my depression. Hmm, that's just great...I can't sleep because I'm depressed, and yet, I'm depressed because I can't sleep.
I'm trying to get my antidepressants changed (I'm taking 20mg of Lexapro daily); my best friend, my therapist, and now my PCP have suggested a change and I'm starting to think they're right. I'm not really feeling "better" after taking it for six weeks -- if anything, I'm just really numb. The other night, Barbara Walters had a tear-jerker interview with Terri Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter's widow. I couldn't cry. Keep in mind that, previously, I have cried during the Olympics, basketball games, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and countless other really pathetic things. After a really fun sushi dinner with friends the other night, the first thing I thought when we parted ways was, "God, it was nice to feel something." It was brief and I've been so deflated lately -- I'd like to figure out how to hang on to that non-deflated (I guess that would be inflated) feeling.
Graffiti, please.
You asked, Vox, I delivered. Grafitti -- en espanol (pssst: how do I insert in a tilde here?). I took these in San Jose, Costa Rica in February.
I just returned from a museum conference in Taos, New Mexico. I know, I know -- museum folks for a whole week: how did I get so lucky? When I interviewed for this job back in February and heard about this conference, I thought it was a pretty nice perk. Until that point, I had heard nothing but awesome things about Taos -- how it was beautiful and full of artists and blahdy blahdy blah. After spending a week there, though, I can't say I didn't find the town worth all the praise I'd heard...it was like Orlando in the high desert.
I will give Taos that I had a crappy/unsettling first experience there, but, man, first impressions do carry a lot of weight. Since we were still technically "pre-conference" on Tuesday morning, we had some time to kill. My colleague invited me to join her and her friend on a trip to Taos Pueblo. We drove out of the city center a little ways, past a casino and various other hoity-toity shops and galleries where I can't afford shite, until we got to the Pueblo where we were greeted by some friendly men in orange vests. These men informed us that parking was free, but that tips were encouraged, as that was what "allowed [them] to operate." Now, living in Montana -- and even Florida -- I've been on a fair number of reservations and I've never encountered a toll system. I just chalked it up to the pueblo being in such a tourist-friendly area. The orange-vest dude asked us to check-in at the visitor center.
The three of us lined up to talk to the surly woman at the visitor center where we learned that:
(1) Admission is $10 per person, and
(2) If we wanted to bring in a camera, that would be an additional $5.
I've never heard of charging a camera fee anywhere. Maybe I'm not well-traveled, I don't know. Of course, in their literature (a glossy, poorly proofread scant brochure), the camera fee is justified as a way to help them keep their way of life. Funny, I thought that's what the casino was for out front. Whatever. People are allowed to be capitalists for a good cause.
Except I didn't find the whole pueblo experience to be a good cause. You know what lies within the fee area? Stores. Store upon store upon store selling pottery, handmade (and a lot of mass-produced) jewelry, flutes, and, my favorite -- written on the sign outside one store -- "real Indian stuff." So, here we have all of these adobe style homes in an historic area, and you know what I learned? I learned that these folks in New Mexico have access to all sorts of wholesale catalogs.
I especially liked the advisory in the brochure to ask nativesf or their permission before taking a picture of them-- yes, because I so need a picture of some dude, who happens to live near the Taos Pueblo, wearing an Adidas shirt and a gold chain. I mean, who are we kidding? I felt weird enough paying to go into a reservation to go look at how these people -- who still exist -- lived, like they're freaking animals in a zoo. Let's not fool ourselves to think that the people working inside the pueblo are totally isolated from the outside world -- they know they're not, and anyone with an iota of sense should know they're not either. They dress an talk like anyone else roaming around Taos.
What really bothered me is that the people who "run" the pueblo have a great opportunity for education -- a chance to teach people about the pueblo's history, how the people of the pueblo have changed over time, and about the beliefs of the people of the pueblo. But they don't do any of that. There's no signage anywhere that attempts to impart any greater understanding to the visitor -- just lots of signs that basically say "come buy our stuff."
More weirdness arose when we left the pueblo. The opening reception for our conference featured a performance by the Buffalo Dancers, an Indian children's dance troupe (and, yes, it IS "P.C." to say Indian). I've noticed this trend in the various professional conferences I've attended in the last few years -- all of them try to incorporate some Indian performance/ritual of some sort. I can appreciate that as they're an oft-ignored group, both where curriculum development and audience outreach is concerned. That's one thing I actually like about Montana -- they're pouring money into the Indian Education for All Act that requires ALL school students to learn about Montana's native people; the act has been on the books since the 1970s, but it's only been the last few years that the State department of education has offered schools any funding to make this act a reality.
But call me cynical -- part of me thinks we're including all of these Indian aspects to our programming because there's some "white man's guilt" -- as there should be. White men raped numerous indigenous cultures. Still, watching these kids dance (a long and intricate dance; having a short-term memory and no rhythm, I found the dancers most impressive), I felt some weird vibes from our crowd of 400 museum professionals -- I sensed some, "Ah, we must revere these child dancers BECAUSE they are Indian, not because they're damn talented kids, but because I am a white, educated, open-minded person of privilege and that is what my people do." At one point, I turned around and looked at my peers staring at the dancers -- that's when an uneasy feeling set in...wow, here we are, 400 of us, 98% white, having these Indian kids entertain us. They were bussed in to AMUSE us. Had anyone asked the adult leaders of the group afterward how they train, or what the dance means, or anything, maybe I would feel differently -- then, maybe, there would be some sharing of cultures, some, you know, "learning." No such luck.
Reading back over this, I think I sound racist when I really don't mean to be. It's just that I've always had a hard time with watching people as they (supposedly) act in their native environment -- that's why I never pursued graduate work in anthropology: it's weird to me go watch people like they're in a goddamn zoo; nonwhite, non-Americans don't exist so grad students can write masters theses about them.
What's the last thing you usually do or think about before you fall asleep?
Har, har, har, Vox -- you should know that I don't sleep. Geez, if you cared, Vox, you would have read my previous posts. Gah.
I had my adventure in sleep medicine last night and what did I find out? Not a thing. Well, at least not yet. I really hope they discovered something -- apnea, narcolepsy, I don't really care -- because I don't want the elaborate process of attaching 20 some electrodes to my head, neck, and legs to be all for naught. I had to sleep with a tube in my nose last night, man, and it left a deep imprint on the left side of my face -- I really don't want to have done that for nothing. Plus, I'm not sleeping and I would like to know why.
The whole experience was pretty surreal, actually. The last thing I expected to do last night was get into a conversation about Courtney Ellis with a sleep tech who had that permanent makeup stuff (tattooed eyeliner!). You see, Courtney Ellis lived across the street from me in 4th and 5th grade when I lived in northern Illinois; strangely, the electrode tech lived in this same town at the same time and is the same age as me, so she went to high school with all of my little friends from when I was ten. Isn't that a little odd? I mean, we both live in freaking Montana now, and no one lives in Montana (it is quite a sparsely populated state). I didn't expect my electrode-putter-on-er to be a friend of my childhood friends from a town 1600 miles from here. Bizarre.
Other than that small-worldiness, my visit was pretty unremarkable. The sleep techs monitored me with a video camera and had a two-way voice-activated intercom. So, when I needed to pee in the middle of the night, all I had to do was say out loud from my bed, "Is anyone there? I need to go to the bathroom." Then, immediately, someone was in my room, helping me and my head full of wires out of bed (I looked a little John Travolta-in-Battlefield Earth-esque, minus the gratuitous crotch bulge).
Yeah, that's so not hot.
Now, I wait and hope to hear that my insomnia can be cured. That would be much more preferable than finding out that it's just a result of depression and anxiety. Here's the thing about anxiety and insomnia: when I'm anxious, I can't sleep, but since I'm so tired all the time, I can't get out of this depression or over my anxiety. It's cyclical like that.
Foxy (my cute dog) isn't a fan of my insomnia. She sleeps in my bed (yes, I'm single and I realize that sharing a bed with my dog will probably keep me that way for some time; I'm okay with that). Every once in awhile when I'm tossing and turning, I catch her looking over her shoulder at me with this expression of, "For real, just calm the f*ck down and go to sleep already." Yeah, she can be kinda bitchy when she wants to sleep.
So can I. At least I don't have a gratuitous crotch bulge to deal with. I like to sleep on my stomach and I think that having extra materials in that area might impede that.
In keeping with my favorite hobbies (see right), I'm spending the night at Missoula Sleep Medicine; I just can't enough of going to doctors, you know. Actually, I've actively avoided doctors for quite some time. For example, when I broke my foot last October, it took my parents harassing me by phone for two hours -- my mom was even on vacation at the time -- before I finally sucked it up and went to the hospital. Now, though, I'm in this situation where my insurance just kicked in last month and I'm leaving my job in six weeks: I've got to make the most of my insurance before it disappears. Plus, I actually have real health problems that are affecting my quality of life.
One of those problems is insomnia, which, as we know from Lunesta commercials, affects something like 30 million Americans. I've never known my mother and my grandmother to sleep and NOT sleep is something I don't want to do for the next 50+ years of my life. Right now I'm taking Temazepam to knock me out, but it's not helping, even when I double my dosage. So, tonight I'm going to the sleep clinic where they will monitor me as I sleep (or toss and turn for hours like I do every night). The receptionist told me to wear what I normally wear to bed, but to avoid "silky things" and to "try to stick with cotton." That makes me wonder just what people have been wearing when they've wandered into the lab... skimpy negligees? Satin boxers? Nothing at all?
I don't intend for this blog to be solely about my insomnia, anxiety, or other medical issues; I used to be somewhat fun -- see my other blogs! I used to write about butterflies! But I haven't been in a happy place for a few months now; I am working really hard to dig out and get back to that happy place (my happy place has lots of sun, sand, saltwater, and chocolate soy milk. What does yours have?). It's hard, though, to feel better when I'm not sleeping, and, hence, I'm allowing strangers to tape electrodes on my head tonight. Good times.
I'm finishing up my coffee here and getting ready to take my dog Foxy (also known as my foxy dog) down to the farmer's market for some more coffee. Foxy loves going down there because she gets a ton of attention (she's pretty cute) and I love going there because it's something to do. Weekends stress me out. I know that's antithesis to the purpose of The Weekend, but holy crap, what am I supposed to do with myself from 5pm on Friday until 7am on Monday? I miss being in college because at least then I had homework to occupy my time. Now, I have what? Fixing my bike? Going to the gym for a couple hours? Killing time until Monday?
My therapist (yeah, that's right; that's the kind of person I am -- might as well lay it all out there) said that it's important that I plan things. I'm digging out of a deep depression right now and trying to get over my insomnia; two weeks ago I decided that I need a big life change, and so I'm moving back to Florida from Montana. Anyway, so I think I may cook dinner with some of my friends tonight. That would be good for me. I've kind of pulled away from them in the last few weeks because I've been so down. I need to "get over myself", as much as I loathe that phrase. I especially liked the episode of The Sopranos where Edie Falco's character said "what does that even mean?" when her son said the phrase to her. The Sopranos is the perfect television show.
So, anyway, I used to blog regularly on Blogger, but I haven't since I moved back to Montana in April. I can't write when I'm depressed, which I realize means that I can never be A Serious Writer (what would Hemingway be without depression?). But I need to start writing again and I need to get over this hole that I'm in. I've just got to suck it up and Do It. My deepest apologies for me feeling sorry for myself. If you don't like it, don't read it. It's just that easy. Keep in mind that I am trying to make a concerted effort, though, not to be Debbie Downer.
