It's probably no secret that I snore. I don't just give off a little rasp while sleeping, either; I make all kinds of noise. Mrs. Fungus complains frequently and I don't deny it because, well, she's right.
Several years have passed since Mrs. Fungus underwent a sleep study and was prescribed a CPAP unit, and that unit has sat on a shelf in the closet of the computer room ever since. She was going to try it but we didn't have any distilled water (for the integrated humidifier). It sat on the counter, unused, even after we got distilled water for it, and eventually it was put in its resting place...until last night.
I got to bed after 1:30 and sometime around 3:30-ish Mrs. Fungus had enough and yelled at me to be quiet. Rather than ask if she wanted me to repair to the sofa (which is always met with "No") I simply got up, grabbed my blanket and pillow, and went.
Couldn't fall asleep, though. Look, I know I have sleep apnea. Not just because of my wife's descriptions of my snoring; I know because I (with increasing frequency of late) wake up at night gasping a huge lungful of air. I have a panoply of other similar issues, all of which point back to one obvious diagnosis: sleep apnea.
What do they do for that? CPAP, or some variation thereof. In extreme cases, they can operate on the soft palate to make it less prone to clogging up the airway.
So there I was, at 3:30 AM, laying on the sofa, unable to sleep because I couldn't breathe when I started to drift off, and--as had happened many nights before--I thought about my wife's unused CPAP machine. And figured--what the hell--I was already sleeping (trying to, anyway) on the sofa, so why not dig the thing out and give it a try?
Assembly was self-evident. Bottled water into the reservoir (to humidify the supplied air). Had a little trouble with the headset, but only a little, mainly because of how it's meant to be worn, but a quick look at the documentation that came with it fixed that.
Plugged it in, fiddled with the settings a little bit, then tried to sleep. It felt like no air was being supplied, but as I relaxed I could feel slight pressure in my nasal cavity, so I rolled over and tried to sleep. Couldn't, though, because getting used to this thing was really...wait, what happened? The air had shut off. Rolled back over, twiddled a couple of settings, puzzled, then tried hitting the "start/stop" button on top. Then it started actually pushing air, an obvious amount at an obvious pressure. Oh. Yeah. Turning it ON might help.
My excuse: it was nearly 4 AM and I hadn't slept much. Tired people make mistakes.
...and I was almost instantly asleep. And even though I was sleeping on the sofa, I slept like an entire brick factory. The mask was no hindrance, the CPAP machine was dead silent, and the presence of fresh air at my nostrils with a few PSI of positive pressure over ambient was enough to keep my soft palate out of my airway. And I slept a solid six hours with no interruptions.
Guess this means I'd better make space for the thing on the nightstand. Eh?
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Governor's State is not far from the Fungal Vale. In 1986, someone erected a monolith in the "sculpture park"--ie field dotted with junk piles--that remained for three months before it was taken down.
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Anyway, it's time to play the new expansion pack for WoW, which has been out since Monday, so short shrift for the rest:
Trump's lawsuits in Pennsylvania are likely to succeed. Changes to voting law there were "unconstitutional", says the judge issuing the injunction.
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"Biggest sting op in US history", they're saying, of the 2020 electons.
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COVID-19 did not amount to as much of a pandemic as the left had hoped. Not that they're changing their plans any.
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Captain Eyeliner is prepared to punish Republicans if Trump doesn't concede. Heh. hehhehhehheh.
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All right, off to the Shadowlands.
