I can honestly say that neither one of us had fun last night… Poor mom though. The technician who helped us could not have been nicer. The night started out a little stressful because I was having problems with the van. We had a wheelchair lock installed and it was not working as easily as it should have. Something I need to look into more, but I’ll deal with that later. After muttering some kind of words under my breath for several minutes, I was finally able to get mom out of the van and we headed up to the Sleep Study suite.
We were greeted right away and were shown to mom’s room. It was actually quite nice. I pretty comfy bed, a color TV, a phone, and an armoire. Nice enough, right? I think it would have posed no issues for a more able-bodied person however my mom being a little on the short side and not having mobility on her left side made things a little tricky. Here’s a pic of mom before her getting hooked up…
The bed is actually pretty comfortable. But it’s SO HIGH! It’s not abnormally high. It’s a standard bed but after getting used to a lower bed this was somewhat of a fiasco getting her into. After doing what we needed to do to get her as ready for bed as possible, we waited for the tech to come in and attach all of the electrodes. As they were being placed mom kept cracking up. At one time she said that she felt like she was an alien. I told her that I thought that this was what aliens did to the people they abducted.
She looks happy here, but this was right after the tech and I hoisted her onto the bed and literally dragged her into place. She was hooked up to so many wires I thought for sure we were going to lose at least one but to my surprise everything stayed in tact. By the time she was able to try to sleep it was after 11pm. Well past her bedtime. Given that she had both PT and OT earlier in the day (and no nap) I thought for sure she’d be out like a light. Nope. I was actually given my own room to sleep in. I had a hard time falling asleep myself (even wire-free) and was nice and cozy when I got a knock on my door just after 5am. The tech said that mom was awake and had actually been up for awhile and asked her to wake me up. She was done. Ready to go. When I went in to get her packed up to head home, the tech asked us to fill out a survey. The wanted to know about her quality of sleep during the night. How long it took to fall asleep, how often she woke up, was she tired, did she feel rested, etc. When I asked her these questions, she told me that she did not sleep at all. Naturally she was exhausted. I passed the info onto the tech who said that she did sleep a little bit, but not much. When she did sleep, there was “activity”. I’m assuming that means they at least caught her snoring. That’s the good news (I guess, if you want to call it that). The bad news is that there might not be enough data to make a diagnosis. Either way, this activity has been checked off of the bucket list. Mom said she won’t do it again. Can’t say that I blame her. We’ll see what the report revealed when we go for our follow up on the 27th.