Bit of Ivory

Well, last night was my first night with the C-PAP. It lasted about an hour. I discovered that I can’t keep my mouth completely shut at night.This isn’t surprising, considering that all your muscles relax when you fall asleep, including your jaw muscles. But with a C-PAP, that’s a bad thing. Because if you open your mouth just a little, it allow the airto enter your mouth, and you get air blowing out of your mouth instead of down into your lungs. So every time I was almost asleep, I’d get woken up with a mouth full of air. My dad has a C-PAP machine, too, and he used to have this same problem. He has a ingenious solution- The Jacob Marley Memorial Headsling. You remember Jacob Marley, the ghost on A Christmas Carol? Remember how he ties his jaw up with a bit of cloth? Well, my dad does something similar. He has an elastic-like tube that my brother got when he had his wisdom teeth out. You’re supposed to use it to keep ice right on your mouth where you need it. Anyway, it works great at keeping my dad’s mouth shut. Mom even bought a few more from the oral surgeon. I’m going to try one tonight– I couldn’t last night, because by the time I figured out I needed one, Dad was already asleep and I didn’t want to wake him up. There was one other problem, too. My room is in the basement, at the other end of the house from the stairs. We don’t have central air conditioning, just a swamp cooler, so the cool air doesn’t tend to make it into my room. I get all the humidity, though. And I can’t open my windows because both my screens are broken and all the bugs can just crawl in. So my room is extremely stuffy. Add some extra humidity from the C-PAP machine, and I felt like I was suffocating. I couldn’t get a deep, satisfying breath at all. Oh, and it doesn’t help that my nose gets kind of stuffy at night. I use some steroidal nose spray, but it doesn’t seem to help much. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to keep the C-PAP on, considering it was making it DIFFICULT to breathe when it’s supposed to be making it EASIER.

I took the mask off at 1:30 am, and slept without it for the rest of the night. The doctor says it’s going to take me at least 3 weeks to get used to it, and that my sleeping will probably get worse until I do. Then, of course, it supposed to be better. But carting this Snuffleupagos to my school apartment with me is not a very appealing thought.

I’m about to echo Garion.

Why me?