My Dream Job

Jul 2010 Issue

By Dave Ellis
My wife tells me that I don’t sleep normally as I sometimes stop breathing. Basically my sleep mode goes into sleep mode. This startles her as she has taken some medical courses and told me that you need to breathe to live. That course was well worth the money.

Not only do I stop breathing but when I do breathe it’s done via snoring from my mouth. (Please visit instantrimshot.com and click the red button after each of the following lines. Really. I’ll wait.) According to the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program my snoring is upsetting the delicate balance of the San Andreas fault. My snoring is so bad my wife bought one of those white noise sound systems and stuffed it in my mouth! One time I woke up my wife and kids with my snoring and that was when I was away on a business trip on the east coast! Thank you and try the veal.

So I made an appointment with my doctor. He examined me and determined that, aside from all the fat, I’m a pretty healthy guy (seriously). I celebrated by having fried chicken for lunch afterwards (seriously). He did worry about my health while sleeping, though. Many men who snore and are nearing the age of forty have had their wife bludgeon them with a lamp due to the noise. I don’t want to put my wife through that, so I agreed I would attend a sleep study.

If you’ve never been to a sleep study then you are missing out on the worst sleep of your life. First they attach a bunch of wires to your head, way more than I normally wear at night. Then all night long they monitor every aspect of your sleep with a camera in the room. Every time I woke up the technician would bolt into the room asking if I was OK. Not creepy at all. You know the guy that normally watches me sleep is considerate enough to hide quietly in the closet.

Sleep normally comes pretty easily to me. I can nod off faster than a newborn with a full tummy-tumkins. As soon as I laid down at the sleep clinic I was fast asleep, only to be jarred awake by the technician’s voice. “I need you to stay awake for a moment,” he said. “But I’m studying,” I replied sleepily. He then had me do some microphone checks for sound followed by asking me to stop singing as the test was over. He then wished me a good night and frankly it sounded like a challenge. The night was not good.

I pulled the heart monitor sensor off of my finger twice that night. I woke up the second time to the technician taping it onto my finger. I also woke up because I had a dream that fifty wires were glued to my head. I was relieved to wake and find it was only forty. I drifted back to sleep and was snoozing pretty well until the study ended and I had to go home…at five in the morning! What? I was studying so hard and the technician turned the lights on! Bogus.

I’m still waiting for the results of the study. I think I did well on technique but I was lacking in my artistic choreography. I guess I kind of phoned it in. Well I can still sleep at home on the amateur circuit in hopes that one day I’ll get my big break. Hopefully it’s not in the form of a lamp to the head.