Armageddon, PAP Machines, and Other Bedtime Stories

 There are seasons in life when the practical and the existential collide in the oddest places—like a hospital sleep lab, a mortality table, or a phone that won’t stop ringing because someone you love remembers the past more clearly than the present. What begins as a simple medical test can open a trapdoor into bigger questions: how we measure a life, how we outlive the people who shaped us, and how memory—our own and others’—keeps tugging us backward even as time keeps pushing us forward. This is a story about breathing, dreaming, aging, and the strange comfort of knowing that even the actuarial “house odds” can’t quite account for the human heart….AI

 

Tomorrow I’m spending the night in the hospital for a sleep study. I flunked the at‑home test—apparently I’m not breathing in the “safe zone.” My sleep doctor said I stop breathing or am breathing very shallow on an average of 64 times an hour. 30 times an hour is considered severe and over 60 times is considered life‑threatening. (And here I though I'd slept exceptionally well the night of the test.) Several times after surgery, anesthesiologists have told me I’m a shallow breather, so I’m not surprised to learn I sleep the same way. I’ll be getting one of the PAP machines—whichever kind the test tomorrow night determines I need. I just hope I can actually sleep in a hospital setting so they can get what they need.

On one hand, I’m looking forward to getting the machine, knowing I’m less likely to die in my sleep. On the other hand, it’s oddly empowering to know that if Armageddon breach our shores—perhaps in retaliation for us electing a president who brought his own version of Armageddon to so many other countries—I could simply refuse to use the machine, pulling my own plug so-to-speak, and cross my fingers I don't wake up. (Can you believe what the U.S. led oil embargo is doing to Cuba? Last I heard Mexico and China were both attempting to deliver ships full of desperately needed food and medical supplies, while our president seems to be waiting to sweep in like a vulture to pick the bones of the died.)

Back on topic: Thinking about sleep inevitably leads me to thinking about dreams. Will the machine affect my dream life? I dream of my husband so often that some mornings I don’t want to get out of bed, even when my bladder is telling me I'd better get up if I know what's good for me. He’s been gone fourteen years, but with his nightly visits it doesn’t feel that long. He was the best friend I ever had—and that includes my best female friend since kindergarten, who has been calling several times a day since her family moved her into memory care a few weeks ago.

She lives in another state, and before her move we touched bases maybe seven or eight times a year. From what I can tell, she has major short‑term memory issues, but her memories of our childhood friendship are still intact. It’s been fun to revisit our past antics with her. But I’ve had to start turning my phone off at night so her early‑morning calls don’t wake me. She’s called as many as seven times in a day, just like we did when we were kids, but now she doesn't remember talking to me earlier in the day. And I’m not sure if she remembers her husband who died a few months ago.

Memory is funny that way—what stays, what slips, what returns in dreams. Many widows (myself included) remember our spouses vividly, but we tend to put on rose‑colored glasses. Disagreements tend fade, and what remains are the character‑revealing moments: the times they stood by us or held us together during the hard times, the times we laughed, traveled, made love or simply sat together in companionable silence. Sunday mornings with newspapers and coffee were always special, even when the dog decided to lay down in the middle of the spread-out paper. At least that’s my experience. When I’m awake, I remind myself Don was nowhere near perfect. Even in my dreams he’s not Princess Charming rescuing me from my daytime woes. More often than not I’m chasing after him and our last dog, begging them not to leave just because I have to get up and pee.

And once you start thinking about the people you’ve lost, it’s hard not to think about how we'll eventually go. We’ve all read stories about spouses who die within hours or days of one another. Recently I saw a story about a man and his dog who died together. Their son found them side by side in a La‑Z‑Boy and thought they were sleeping; he even snapped a photo. Near the end of my dad’s life, I did the same thing—only I thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. He looked so peaceful, but so old, and his memory was unreliable. I remember thinking that if he had to die, doing it in his favorite chair with that peaceful expression was the way to go. When he finally did die in a hospice home the last thing he said was, “Am I there yet? Is this the Pearly Gates?” which made me laugh so hard I couldn’t stop. It was Christmas Eve at midnight and organ music was blasting from his roommate's TV. Aging has a way of turning these unexpected moments into mile markers.

When you get to my age every birthday is a mile marker and you can’t help wondering how and when you’ll start that journey into the Great Unknown. In my case, a young salesgirl once showed me the actuarial projections my continuum‑care facility ran on me before accepting my down payment. She wasn’t supposed to show them to potential residents and she may have lost her job for doing it. I had asked if she was absolutely sure I’d have enough money to live there, and she said, “Oh yes—see this mortality table? It estimates your life expectancy based on age, health and other factors. You’re going to live five years in independent living, two years in assisted living and two months in skilled nursing.”

In October I will have lived here five years, and don’t think that fact doesn’t weigh on me. The computer programs that make those actuarial projections keep the insurance industry thriving. In other words, the House always wins… unless it’s a Trump casino, which he managed to bankrupt along with a dozen other businesses. I just hope he doesn’t do the same with our country.

And now here I am, circling back to that sleep study. I’m wondering if they ordered a new mortality table that factored in a PAP machine, would it change anything? Will it help me beat the House odds? Or am I just grasping at straws? In the end, none of us really knows how long we get — we just keep breathing, dreaming and hoping the House doesn’t call in its chips before we've checked everything off our Bucket Lists. ©