Bit of Ivory

Despite duct-taping the window in my room open (to keep the bugs out), it was still too humid last night, and the air coming through the CPAP was even more humid. The mask came off at 1:00 am. The Jacob Marley Memorial Headsling worked like it was supposed to, though.

I’m really tired.

But my Ponderosa Pine still smells like butterscotch. I’ve named him Ron.

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?

They’re setting me up with a C-PAP machine tomorrow. I hate life.

I’m The Psychic Butt-Kicker.

*giggle* Well, it works, I suppose.

Oh, and I’m still tired. Not as tired as last week, but still tired.

I’m never really fully alert– just varying degrees of tiredness.

Man, I’m getting sick of this.

I am SOO tired.

Actually, being tired is not all that unusual for me. I’ve been tired for years– literally– ever since I was diagnosed with Mononucleosis in July of 2000. I had to take a semester off of school, and even now I can’t take classes that start too early in the morning. I went to a doctor about a year ago, to see if my continuing tiredness was still the mono or if it was something else. We tired a few different sleep medications, and some behavioral changes, but nothing helped. So he referred me to a sleep specialist. He looked over my file, asked me some questions, and said that he couldn’t tell why I was so tired all the time. So in February I slept overnight in the hospital’s sleep center. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t see how ANYONE could sleep with electrodes stuck all over your body (head, chest, and legs), two finger monitors, two respiratory monitoring belts (one around my stomach, one around my chest), a blood pressure cuff (which went off every 10 minutes) and an oxygen monitor stuck up your nose. Needless to say, I got almost no sleep. But apparently, I got enough for them to see that I had several hypopneas (a breath that’s under a normal breath, usually 50% or less) during the night. They thought that those might be distrupting my sleep. So on Wendesday, I went back to the Sleep Center, and they hooked me up to a CPAP machine, which basically blows air into your nose and forces you to keep breathing. I didn’t have to have the blood pressure cuff this time, luckily, but the CPAP actually DISTURBED my sleep, rather than helping it. Every time I almost fell asleep, something would happen with the mask, or the hose, or something like that, and it would wake me up. I think I lay awake most of the night. They were supposed to release me at 6:30 am, but I’d been awake for more that a half an hour straight by 5:30, so they sent me on my way. I went home, washed the glue from the electrodes out of my hair, and slept until 11.

I still hadn’t recovered by Thursday, and since Thursday was the Fourth of July, I had a busy day. We didn’t get back from the fireworks until midnight, and even then I was so worked up that I didn’t fall asleep until 1 am.

The alarm clock rang at 6:45 this morning. I had to go to work. Blah.

Now can you see why I’m tired?

Further to previous post, I found a dowloadable version at gamehouse.com,
who makes the game. I’ll probably be downloading the trial version
tonight, if not the full $19.95 version. Go me!

Yesterday, I took the time to stop and smell the pine tree.

You see, a long time back, my family went on a camping trip to Bryce Canyon National Park. One night, the park rangers gave a little slide show presentation about the flora and fauna in the park. She specifically pointed out the Ponderosa Pine, whose bark smelled either of butterscotch or vanilla, depending on who you talked to. Well, being the young children that we were, we spent the rest of the trip going up to various trees and sniffing them. To me, they smell like butterscotch. I wish I could say they smell like vanilla, because it’s one of my favorite smells, but it doesn’t– it’s definitely butterscotch.

Well, ever since then, when my family is out in the woods, we search for the smell of butterscotch. Once, we were in Yosemite National Park, and the smell of butterscotch was very heavy in the air– there were Ponderosa Pines everywhere! Even a hint of butterscotch will send my family smelling every tree in sight. Actually, once we know it’s there, we can usually pick out a Ponderosa from the other trees around.

To make a short story long, one night as I was walking back to my car after work (I have to park in student parking, which, as everyone knows, is about as far away from campus as possible), when the strong odor of butterscotch filled my nostrils. I looked around, and there, in front of the Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum, was a Ponderosa Pine! I was thrilled. I walked up to it and stuck my nose up to the bark, breathing deeply. It smelled wonderful.

Ever since then, I’ve stopped by every once in a while to smell the tree. I’m sure it looks really strange to anyone who happens to be passing, but I don’t care. I’m a tree-sniffer, and proud of it.

Next time, I’ll tell you about my family’s somewhat similar (but also different) obsession with Pinion Pines.

I’ve been somewhat dissatisfied with the look of my blog for a while now– although I liked the layout. I looked at some of the other templates available, but I didn’t really like any of them. I’m not savvy enough to come up with my own template, so that option is out. But then, I had a brilliant idea! Keep the layout, but change the colors! So, after a lot of fiddling, my page is now more—summer-y! (To quote The Scarlet Pimpernel.) Cool, eh?

to my twin sisters, Lisa and Laura! They turned 19 today– I hope it’s a good one!

Oh, and I got a new counter. I was really sick of that Count Z one being unavailable. Hopefully this new service will be more reliable. Plus, this one doesn’t count for mutliple hits in a row, which I think is better. Every time I checked my site to see if it updated, it added a hit. This way, it will count who visits, not how many times the page gets refreshed.

So yesterday I went to a wedding reception. It was a fun one, because the bride and groom were both from Murray. They had been high school sweethearts, actually. After we graduated, Spencer went on an LDS mission to the Netherlands for two years, while Traci started college. She even went to the BYU Jerusalem Center for a semester, before they decided it was too dangerous to have 120 American students in Jerusalem for 4 months at a time. Anyway, when Spencer got back, he and Traci started dating again, and they got married yesterday. Murray weddings are fun, because it’s practically a high school reunion. I saw lots of people I haven’t seen in years– some since graduation, even. It was lots of fun. And since it was at the Lion House (the house Brigham
Young built and lived in during the early days of Salt Lake City), the food was really good. I like weddings.