Rest your head...

...it's time for bed
-Mark Kozelek, Bedtime Lullaby


(Another lovely song from Yo Gabba Gabba - all you haters need to at least listen!)

Zzzzzz. The sleep study. Zzzzzzzz.

So last week we headed to Duke to see if putting stickers on Luke's head would help the docs determine why he snores like a 50 year old man. Sidenote, by "we headed to Duke" I mean "Luke and Jen headed to Duke." Normally all things hospital default to Dr. Veterinarian. 'Cause, you know, children are just small cows. But since sleep study landed on poor Dr. Vet's birthday, I thought it kindest to let him sleep in his own bed. Plus, I generally excel at getting the Lukester to sleep, and sleep was most definitely our goal here.

Of course, my exceptional getting kid to sleep skills did not extend to getting kid to sleep with pointy objects sticking up his nose...

We arrived at Duke at our assigned appointment time of 8 p.m. clad in our PJ's (yes, both of us) and ready to show 'em what fine sleepers we are. Of course, kid is normally asleep by 7:15, so I was quite certain that he'd conk out en route to Durham. Amazingly, he stayed awake. Guess it's hard to sleep with your window rolled down as your mom whizzes down I-40 at 80 mph. (See, I not only have getting to sleep skills, I have delaying sleep skills!) We wandered around & admired the fish tank until we were summoned upstairs.

I kept thinking this was a familiar place (we haven't spent much time at big Duke since Jay was a newborn). I eventually realized that the sleep study room was right next door to the room where we waited for them to decide that he did indeed need a second overnight stay to check on heart issues. (This was also the site of what I now call the "square boobs incident" ... a story that deserves a blog post all its own. Just a teaser to keep you tuned in.)

So, the tech gets Luke all hooked up to about 6 million wires and he is generally pretty good about it. We try to distract him with a video, but he's not that into it, and the tech isn't really able to get the VCR (no, I didn't misspell DVD) working. She can only make it rewind, though it does show the cartoon characters moving in reverse. Could I make this stuff up?! He's getting cranky, but not putting up much of a fight.

Then, she brings out the nasal cannula. You know, the little clear plastic thing that's in the nose of every television hospital patient? The thing that's supposed to make them look sickly? She was supposed to put one on to measure the carbon dioxide he's breathing out. Well, she might as well have tried to stick a hot poker up his nose. He was not having it and was swinging punches with all his might. So she wisely decided to let him fall asleep and return with hot nasal poker, uh, I mean cannula, when he's zonked out. In the meantime, he twists and turns and thrashes and fights until the 6 million wires are quite literally braided around his leg. But around 9:30, he finally falls asleep.

(Please note that in spite of the mummy wrapping, his hair is still sticking up!)

I began the untangling process and she returned with cannula. She's been watching his brain waves, so she knows he's in REM sleep and should just snooze right on through this little cannula addition. It's just two more pieces of tape and a little plastic tube in your nose, right? Wrong. Let's just say he woke back up and was NOT HAPPY happy about it. So she left me to practice my baby settling skills, and she'd come back when he was really good & asleep. (You see where this is going, right?) Let the tossing and thrashing commence again!

She repeated this little game no less than 4 times, each about an hour apart. Cannula is now hanging across his sleepy little mouth, and he's fighting mad. At 1:30 a.m., she suggested we go home and try again another night. Are you bleepin' kidding? I'm sorry, but we've now been here over 5 hours, and I have absolutely no intention of trying this another night. What in the world makes you think it would be different then?! (I get a little cranky when I'm overtired. Wonder where my kids get it from?) I told her in no uncertain terms that she was going to have to get whatever data she could get from the 6 million things that were currently attached, and she was going to let him sleep the remainder of the night.

For some reason, after my little outburst she felt compelled to show me the computer monitor with his adorable little brain waves. Ummmm, hello? It's approaching 2 a.m. and I'm supposed to be at work in a mere 6.5 hours. How's about we take a nap? But in showing me the monitor, she realized that the cannula's location hanging across his open mouth was enough to pick up the reading she wanted. Well, not exactly what she wanted, but better than nothing. So we managed to tape it there and roll with it. And we did get a good 5 hours in after that.

And now we wait. We won't hear anything for another couple of weeks, and I will bet large sums of money that they will want to take out his tonsils. As long as there's no nasal cannula involved, I'm cool with that.

Hey - my initials are back! Some computer stuff I just don't understand - it was there, then it was a broken image, and now it's back. Spiffy.