Living Without a Uvula;if you call that "living"

Fig. 1. Douchebag.

Coming out of the long, tedious, and frankly painful recovery process, I am now kind of emerging and taking stock of what's changed, apart from being able to sleep without choking. They say there are men of words and men of action - I'm definitely in the former camp. I'm a talker, because if you grow up loving learning (and surrounded by proud ignoramuses) and dark (surrounded by blondes) and fat (surrounded by natural athletes) and funny (surrounded by dull people) you really only have one edge, so you develop it. Being funny got me out of a lot of scrapes when I was a kid - making your persecutors laugh defuses whatever it is in them that wants to beat you up, and might even earn you a couple of friends. And then later, girls seem to appreciate funny and lumpy a lot more than ripped and assholish [Fig. 1]. But it's all about vocal control - pitching, volume, punctuating with noises, doing funny accents, that kind of thing. Cheap tricks compared to real acting, of course, but I found that those skills have served me well in the classroom to keep students engaged. If they're entertained, they're paying attention, at least.

Fig. 2. Oinkiotomy

My surgeon really did a number on my neck, for which I am grateful, but it's taking some getting used to. I kind of had to re-learn how to talk, which didn't take very long, but I am still having trouble with some words, or when I try to talk fast or loud; I trip over my tongue or bounce around in my mouth. I am also, as predicted, utterly unable to correctly pronounce the 'uvular R' in French. Admittedly I don't speak French as much as I used to (say, when I was in France), but I do put on some ridiculous accents in class sometimes. Not sure how to address that - perhaps I will trill my R's in French so people will just think I have a Spanish accent. I also cannot get the deep resonant "p-khhhoooowww!" that one employs when one represents explosions or cannon fire. Zain and I were playing with some pirate action figures and my guy fired his pistol and all I could manage was an airy "poh!" Zain yelled "ha! misfire!" and he proceeded to slash me from brain ter brisket, avast thar. Yardarmed in such manner, later I suffered a further humiliation at bedtime when trying to replicate the snort of a pig and coming up with nothing at all. My dear friend Dr. Mauk, a professor of Linguistics from Pitt, tells me that the uvular R is physiologically the same thing as the explody-noise and the oink, so it makes sense [Fig. 2 and 3].

Fig. 3. Not a douchebag

I'm willing to trade all that, no problem, for the extra twenty years of stroke-free life I've been promised, and the ability to sleep and even to dream again (been having doozies, after two decades of no dreams). Nor am I trying to compare myself with many of my colleagues in scholarship at the Society for Disability Studies, who every day have to deal with a lot more than suddenly not being able to oink. It's just a small reminder of Solomon's law, gam zeh ya'avor; this, too, shall pass. Our health, our voices, our able-ness - easy come, easy go. Carpe diem, y'all. Peace!

The Benefits of Getting Your Throat Ripped Out

I'm writing this because I've always wanted to put it down on paper but frankly I never had the self-awareness before to really describe it.

Fig. 1. Anthony Hopkins as John Talbot. Go get 'em, Tony!

When you are an insomniac, nighttime is, to steal a phrase from the character John Talbot in the recent remake of The Wolfman, "a wilderness of horrors" [Fig. 1]. You never know what kind of a journey you're going to have, but you know it won't be nice. You dread bedtime. You avoid it, you pace around it like a wolf in a cage. A good night is when you lie awake thinking of all the things you've done wrong, ever. Something hunts you. Your brain runs grainy, poorly-produced films of your failures. You spend your time staring at that frozen clock blinking 3:20 am knowing that now, no matter what happens, tomorrow is going to suck. Maybe you get up and watch tv, but you can't really work because you're tired and raw and scattered. On a good night, if you're me, you prowl the house, the internet, the refrigerator, and get whatever sleep you can on the couch. If you do sleep, it's an abyss, full of nightmares, or a gray, timeless blank that seems to do nothing to assuage the fatigue toxins accumulated in the previous day. Coffee would help clear your head, but then you can forget about sleeping at all. I've gone the other way a lot - brew up some joe, do some jumping jacks, and then you can work or play coherently through the night. But that's not a good idea - you can get away with a day, maybe, but the second day is much worse, and by nighttime you want to crawl out of your skin. After three days, you're in a perpetual fog. Little creatures flash at the peripheries. After five days of not sleeping, you have conversations with people who aren't there, and this is in the daytime. You take little side trips to alternate dimensions, which sounds fun, doesn't it? Whee. The thing that hunts you gets closer [Fig. 2].

Fig. 2. Insomnia - an insider's perspective.

Sleep to me is something that has for the past twenty years come in sporadic, short bursts - little oases in a big desert that slake just enough to make the aridity worse. If you're an insomiac, you know this - you fall asleep for fifteen minutes, then you're awake for two hours, sleep for fifteen minutes, and awaken again disoriented, frustrated, heart pounding, brain yoked in steel wool. The thing hunting you all night manifests in the room, staring from the edge of the bed. After a century, it gives up that soulless stare and gradually resolves itself into a shirt hanging from a hook, or something, which is small comfort. You feel like you're losing your mind. Or, you choke down some zolpidem tartrate (the down-market ambien), and then you feel like the poisoned corpse of Alexander VI, so bloated that the Swiss Guard have to jump on you to stuff you into your coffin. Sleep comes then under pressure, like a big hand holding you down until the alarm goes off. You come out of that groggy and bleary and on edge, and it takes a steady suction of caffeine to get through the waking day.

This experience is not uncommon, I know. But in my case, things continued to get worse over the years. For years, the second I fell asleep, I stopped breathing, so my brain mainlined the adrenaline cascade, and I caromed out of a dreamless sleep bolt upright, scared, angry, ready to fight or run, sometimes thrashing. The air pressure unit I had made things better for a while. If you have a CPAP you know it's no picnic - it's uncomfortable, noisy, it constantly blasts you with random spurts of air in your face, when it's up to speed you have to really work your lungs to exhale, and it perpetually farts and squeaks. Mine was set at 18 psi, out of 20 maximum - I hear that's pretty extreme - everyone else I know has theirs set at 4 or 6. But for me it improved my ability to stay asleep by about 50%, and so it was worth putting up with.

Fig. 3. This won't hurt a bit.

How you live with this, and try to eat right and exercise, and have a career and raise a family? Well you can plow forward with your wind machine telling yourself nothing's seriously wrong and yet complaining about it to anyone who has the misfortune of being stuck in an elevator with you until sooner or later it gets the better of you and some doctor says "it's time to rip out your throat" [Fig. 3]. Which, if you have a sense of humor about it (which I did NOT) is kind of like letting that thing that was hunting you catch up and kill you, and in the process discovering that you actually were the thing that was hunting you. Very Zen.

So the good news is, like most of the things that Zen promises if only you can resolve the ridiculous paradoxes, it worked. Haven't used the CPAP since. I admit it has been hard to fall asleep, because I am pretty uncomfortable from the surgery still, but once I fall asleep I more or less stay asleep -at least, I do not choke or stop breathing, and when I wake up I FEEL like I've slept! I used to drink about six cups of coffee before 1 o'clock - now I drink one or two.  I used to drink four diet cokes in in the afternoon and at dinner, now I drink one. I'm settling into a sleep pattern I can describe as "regular." The effects of the surgery were immediate but, as the scars in my throat solidify and tighten, it's getting even better.

I'm not fully recovered yet from the surgery, but it's kind of a new world. And best of all I'm not going to have to buy those silver bullets - which is a relief, because, have you priced those things lately?

Gettin' old ain't for wimps

Fig. 1. Shmegegge.

Medical procedures are fascinating, aren't they? I often considered becoming what my Bubby Becky would have called "a doctor doctor," as opposed to what I am which is "a doctor of shmegegge" (Fig. 1.). But I have three barriers in my persona: I'm no good at science, I find the interiors of living bodies intensely repulsive, and I have big muscly clumsy fingers that have difficulty typing on an iPhone keypad. Not the kinds of fingers you want wrapped around your aorta, push comes to shove.

Fig. 2. Not good.

So anyway it turns out I have Obstructive Sleep Apnea. I'm writing about this because I'm feeling strongly like it's a big chapter in my life, and it occurs to me that other people could benefit from this knowledge. I wish I knew about this ten years ago, or even twenty, when I started suffering from it. If you think you might have some of these symptoms, I encourage you to find a doctor who will help you.

In everyone, the tissues in your throat relax when you sleep. In my case, when this happens the tissue shut off my airflow [Fig. 2]. Each time this happens, I get a panic response with a shot of adrenaline that jolts me out of sleep so that I can open my throat and breathe. Preferable to dying, yes. Problem - it's a vicious cycle that keeps me out of deep sleep. The results - apart from, well, insomnia, sleepiness, which sometimes causes me to fall asleep during the day even while I am in conversations with people, and general exhaustion, missing meetings and deadlines, forgetting things, there's also the really fun stuff; morbid consequences to the mind and body such as obesity, hypertension, heart attack, stroke, diabetes, anxiety, depression, dementia and unexplained sudden death. Also, there's this: [Fig.3]

Fig. 3. One reason to get a good night's sleep.

So after years of experimenting with sleeping pills, herbal medicines, appliances, strips, inserts, plugs, losing weight, exercising, and meditating, with no effect, last year I had a series of polysomnography studies which determined that, well, I figure I should spare you the details, but it's really bad. Bad enough that a pulmonary specialist who looked at the results kept asking me if I was really a tenured professor at Carnegie Mellon - it seems that most people my age who have this problem are 350-pound shut-ins, or dead, or both. So, hey, that's something. For the past 20 years I've been turning my insomnia into a longer productive day, I guess.

So the pulmonary specialist strapped me in every night to a machine that blasts air into my lungs, which is like sleeping with your head hanging out of a Mack truck doing 85 on the highway. Also I have an oxygen compressor, so I am a genuine cyborg now. My bedroom sounds like the factory floor at Boeing. This improved matters, but not enough. So after a year of that, finally I'm heading for surgery. Yay!

Fig. 5. Like you don't have crap in your neck.

Apparently, they are going to clear out all the extraneous shit that should have evolved out anyway, shrink my knockwurst-sized turbinates, and clear out all the crap in my neck [Fig. 5]. After that, apparently, I will commence to lose weight (metabolism realignment), get in terrific shape (work out in evenings instead of collapsing), diminish anxiety, win friends and influence people, and, you know, solve all of my physical and personal problems [See Figs. 6 and 7].

Fig. 6. Before

Fig. 7. After