I've really been tunin in to the healthy living lately, so I thought I'd review some of my adventures with the healthcare industry! I've shared a room with many of my fans, e.g., bunson in the pinecone basement. And even if we haven't been roomates, odds are that I've fallen asleep on the floor/couch/chair or other such place in the room with most of you (e.g. that time I fell asleep on the floor before the pizza came and Joel used my face as a dipping sauce pan for his breadstix). Just the other night I fell asleep on jon's floor and got lint all in my beard. So anyway, while @alison doesn't draw things on my forehead like some of my fans, after 27.9 years it was time to get a sleep study. Now, I didn't always realize that I had sleep problems. I love dreaming, especially about swinging through the trees, so I usually try to bread as early as possible. However, @alison has advised me that my sleep isn't as tight as it seems to me (get it--sleep tight?). Though in my dreams I might be hooting and hollering on some simien adventure, in the waking world i was actually snoring like the dickens. Since we've been living together I've had three night-time rituals: 1. Fill a glass of water up to the tip-top, 2. Take my blood pressure pill, and 3. put on a nose schwangler to discourage mouthbreathing/snoring. But, despite these efforts, I still sound like an overloaded freight train, and apparently wake myself up about as often as a train stops. Turns out I rarely get more than a few minutes sleep without waking myself up from snoring, and I usually wake up around 5-6am and then can't get back to sleep. So I signed on for a sleep study.
I have class on Thursday nights til 8, so I scheduled the study for a thursday night. It was up in Bethesda, MA, so I just drove str8 from class. Since I'd been studying hard all afternoon, I didn't have time for dinner, so after I parked the car in a spooky, empty lot, I went over to Panera, which was the only place open at that ungodly hour. I had a BLT, which was delicious, but also salty (prolly why I take the blood pressure pills). Don't worry--this will be relevant later. So I get to the place and fill out some forms and take stock of the other people getting studied--mostly overweight old dudes. Suffice to say I could probably bench press more than all of them combined. Since it was past 9, I promptly decided to hit the hay. The "hay" here is a small room with a double bed. A nurse followed me into the breadroom, and attached about a thousand wires to my body, from my head to my toes. When I looked in the mirror I expected that all that electricity would make my hair stand up like Yahoo Serious. Alas I have no hair so I couldn't tell how those electrodes were affecting me. As you might know, one of my greatest fears is waking up in the middle of the night with dry mouth and no water, and the salty dinner didn't help. Normally I put a giant water cup on the nightstand (or two giant cups if i had pizza for dinner), but here they only had dixie cups, presumably for washing your mouth out after toothbrushing (for the record, the notion of dixie cups always baffles me--just drink from the faucet--but to each his own). Being a resourceful guy, I did what Thomas Edison or a camel would do--fill up about 19 dixie cups and line them up on the night stand. The nurse gave me a look, so I went into a long digression about my fears of nighttime thirst until her eyes glazed over. Finally, the nurse left, but then we had to test the system. During a sleep study, they watch and listen to your every nocturnal move, so we had to test the camera and intercom. So they had me count to five outloud while holding up my fingers. All was a go so i tried to fall asleep. I went through about 10 dixie cups of water before i zonked, but next thing i knew i had to get up and use the facilities lol. But I was so schwangled with wires, so i had to shout to the intercom lady to come unwire me. It've been easier if I'd rolled pinecone style and smuggled an empty water bottle into the room, but i'm afraid the cameras would've caught me and it'd be a bit awkward. Anyway this story is getting out of control so i'll just say i eventually fell back asleep, woke up at 530, and drove home. Results are pending. Maybe I'll do an update when i hear how i did. My guess is they'll charge the insurance company $4,000 to tell me that i snore. But maybe they'll give me a darth vader mask, which would be pretty tight.
About a week after the sleep study, @alison and I had dental appointments. Many of my long time fans will remember that I haven't always been too keen on the oral hygiene. In my defense, I think I made appropriate health decisions--usually the bathroom at wherever I was living was pretty filthy, so I avoided some risk by eschewing the toothbrush. But since I've been in DC I've upheld the highest dental standards--2x a day brushing, plus FLOSSING and mouthwash every night. I mean I seriously go to town with the floss--its like search and destroy missions for plaque. But IRREGARDLESS I worry about the dentist. AT @alison's insistence, I visited a dentist in August 2011, and he yelled at me a lot. I'm a big fan of positive reinforcement, so the drill sergeant (get it--DRILL seargant) thing doesn't really work on me, and the guy charged me a bunch of money to make my mouth hurt. He even tried to charge extra for local anethesia, and if there's one thing I hate worse than pain, it's spending money on non-happy-hour related expenses, so I only signed on for novacane for half of my mouth. Oh boy was that a mistake, and ever since I've come up with all sorts of reasons to avoid the dentist. But I've still flossed and mouthwashed every night (and obvi brushed). But now that I'm on @alison's sweet insurance plan, I know I'll at least be able to write-off the novacane. So I reluctantly agreed to go see the dentist.
Alison assured me that I'd like her dentist. She noted that he likes to hum nonsense songs, has a killer pony-tail, and often forgets what day it is. In short, he's like me if I were a dentist and could grow a pony tail. As with most things, @alison was right. Her dentist rules. I knew I'd like him when we walked in to the office and the waiting room featured a magazine about the mental life of dogs ( i think the magazine was called Mental FLOSS...). There's no receptionist at this office, so we just heard him in the back humming away and making tight jokes with his other patient. He finished up with her, then came and checked us in all by himself (as opposed to with a receptionist). In my experience, "going to the dentist" means going to the dental hygenist, who will yell at me about flossing, then the dentist who will chastize me about my gums, then the receptionist who will berate me about scheduling a follow up appointment. Here, I knew that at worst I'd only have to put up with one person criticizing me. But it turns out I didn't even have to deal with that. After Alison had her teeth cleaned, he called me back. I started humming Chopin's funeral march, but that was unnecesary. He looked at my teeth and said, and I quote, "your teeth look pretty good" !!!! He tested the enamal and said it was strong, and noted that some of the discoloration is just from having braces (don't get me started on my orthodontist lol). He even said to just keep doing what I'm doing. When I told him that I still had my wisdom teeth, he even made a joke about how that means i'll be wise and said he'd only recommend i remove them if the x-ray showed they were actually causing problems. Needless to say, this sort of positive reenforcement had me on "cloud atlas #9", and I didn't even mind the various discomforts inherent to teeth cleaning. All I could think about was how excited I was to tell alison that the dentist said my teeth looked good. Next thing you know I was done with the dental chair and into the x-ray room. He had me put on a lead jacket thing and we joked about doing pull ups with it on, and then took the x-rays and I was done. It was the most pleasant dental experience i've ever had, and I never got yelled at. You could even say it made me smile :-)
