Raiders of the Lost Blog

So a few years back I found out I had a deviated septum. Basically one of my nostrils shuts down and gets blocked as I sleep. I’m getting it fixed with some laser surgery, but before that my doctor wanted a sleep study. He needed to be sure I didn’t have sleep apnea, a condition where your airways shut down while sleeping and you actually stop breathing for a short time.

To do this I was wired up as you can see in the pictures below. Electrodes would measure muscle movement, REM sleep, my breathing, muscle twitches and more. I had to sleep overnight at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Harlem, while they watched me with a night vision camera.

If you think it’s hard to get to sleep sometimes at home, try sleeping with your head and body wired up with electrodes, a tube in your nose, in a room with noisy medical devices and a really annoying buzzing lamp set very low so the room never gets truly dark. Ugh. Rolling over was a 5 minute process too, to make sure that I didn’t pull out any wires.

I was told if there was any serious apnea they would wake me and immediately start treatment, so luckily there was nothing serious. Anyway, here’s some pics of me modeling the wires: