Tammy Jaycox-Kaplan can't sleep. The 29-year-old Weekly Planet interim copy editor has lived with insomnia for years, scraping by on three or four hours' sleep a night. She spends her daytime fatigued and is more naturally inclined to sleep during sunlit hours. Doctors undoubtedly have an exotically clinical term for her particular problem. Some of my more open-minded friends would say that "her Circadian rhythms are all fucked up.
"Insomnia can be caused and exacerbated by any number of factors, from the catchall stress to diet to amount of daily exercise to God knows what else. And Jaycox-Kaplan is worried that her inability to sleep through the night might be indicative of other, more serious disorders, like apnea — a condition wherein a sleeping person's throat muscles relax and loosen to the point where they close off the airway, and the person stops breathing. Apnea is rarely fatal in and of itself, but can contribute to life-threatening health complications over time. So on the referral of her doctor, Jaycox-Kaplan has scheduled an overnight "sleep study." Tonight, she'll be hooked up to all sorts of neat and futuristic-looking machines, tucked into an unfamiliar hospital bed, and watched by a complete stranger as she endeavors to slumber.
Oh, what fun.
"We're going to check everything out, but my bet is I won't be able to sleep the whole time," she says with a rueful chuckle.
I meet Jaycox-Kaplan and her husband Ian outside downtown St. Pete mega-complex Bayfront Medical Center's Emergency Room, an hour and a half or so after sunset. It's a weeknight, and still fairly early, so there aren't really any people slumped in the waiting-room chairs with a bullet-collapsed lung or their right big toe in a bag of ice in their left hand. There are an awful lot of people carrying pillows around, though, and I wonder if my co-worker is about to take part in some weird group experiment. She isn't quite sure herself.
The ER security guard summons someone from Neurology. We wait around and engage in the distracted sort of small talk that only emerges in hospitals, will readings and auto-repair shop lounges. People walk by with their pillows. Then Sleep Tech Doug Martin appears and guides us back to Neurology.
Hospitals are, by nature, frightening places. People are compelled to enter them by force of unwelcome truths. Maybe there are folks who automatically think of newborn babies and lifesaving research, but I automatically think of tumors and death, Coma and The Exorcist 3. It's worse at night — even here in well-lit, modern Bayfront Medical Center — by dint of the deserted stretches of hallway, the sounds of machines not covered by bustle or conversation, or the fresh, strong odor of disinfectant just recently used to clean up … something.
Once through the door marked NEURODIAGNOSTICS/EEG, though, we could be in the private office of a web design firm, or a small architecture or engineering company — something to do with killer computer equipment, anyway. Homey touches like a poster of The Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz and a flyer for an upcoming interoffice party share space with racks of cutting-edge digital technology and a bank of flat-screen monitors.
It seems Jaycox-Kaplan will undergo her study alone. In the back of the tightly crowded space is a single-occupancy version of your average hospital room. There are a few more concessions to comfort, such as a gigantic plush teddy bear and boom box, but the wall-arm mounted TV, rollaway bedside desktop/eating surface, gray-green metal twin bed and ubiquitous heart monitor will not be understated. Here, nearly every night of the week, Martin wires somebody up and monitors 'em, and monitors the monitors monitoring 'em. On the surface, it seems like a weird job for such a nice, normal guy to have. Then again, I doubt the hospital would be in a hurry to hire some twitchy, bug-eyed applicant who "likes to watch the ladies when they's sleepin'."
Sometimes it's someone who, like Jaycox-Kaplan, has a maddening case of insomnia. Often, it's someone who doesn't even know anything's wrong until the person they sleep next to brings it up.
"A lot of times, it's the spouse that complains," says Martin. "They snore, and their spouse notices that they seem to stop breathing in the middle of the night."
While Frasier plays on a four-inch television screen next to the video monitor showing the bedroom's interior, Jaycox-Kaplan fills out a sleep and medical-history questionnaire roughly the thickness of a Kurt Vonnegut Jr. novel. Her husband distracts her by cracking wise. I ask Martin a question intended to make me appear medically knowledgeable, and understand every sixth word of his reply.
By the time she's finished, an episode of The Simpsons is well underway. Martin produces enough colored wire to make the coolest fake movie bomb ever, and begins sticking sensor contacts to her calves (leg movement can be a factor), her upper chest, her chin (the muscles here go lax when a person enters REM sleep). A microphone is taped to her cheek. Another goes under her nose on a strap that encircles her head. He looks for good contact locations on her scalp:
"What are you doing?"
"I'm drawing on your hair."
The white plastic pulse-and-temperature thingie goes on her left pointer finger. When she's fully wired, Mrs. Jaycox-Kaplan looks like a sci-fi marionette.
She also looks about as ready to go to sleep as a veteran speed-freak who just scored a fresh baggie of meth.
Martin checks the readout, has her go though a number of head and eye motions while he fine-tunes the sensors. Now it's time for Mr. Kaplan and me to go; he will come back and collect his wife when Martin calls in the morning, sometime around 5:30 or 6.
As we get off the elevator on the ground floor and wander about unsupervised in search of the unlocked exit closest to the side of the building where we entered, two things bother me considerably.
The first concerns how anybody could possibly produce a reasonable facsimile of natural sleep with eight nodes and two microphones glued and taped to their body, connected to a machine by multiple wires and watched by a stranger.
Second, and more important: What was up with all those people carrying pillows around?
Scott Harrell can be reached at 813-248-8888, ext. 109, or by e-mail at scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in May 21-27, 2003.