Cuckoo

I pulled Nurse Ratched for the sleep study, which was an exercise in both futility and discomfort.

She irritably asserted that I had sleep apnea (because everyone else who comes there does, according to her).

She asserted that my stuffiness at night was not allergies but irritation from the apnea (because everyone else has that problem).

She asserted that my skin couldn't possibly be allergic to/irritated by the glue they used on my head/face or the material the mask for the c-pap is made out of (ignore those little round contact-shaped rashes on your skin in the morning, nobody else ever had those).

In the morning she did admit that I didn't seem to have apnea, but added in a complaining tone that this was probably because when I managed to doze off I slept on my side instead of 'supine'. Evidently I would have had apnea like everybody else if I had slept in the slightly different position I had reported as being my habit. Clearly I was just being difficult. (I do usually tilt a bit further forward than a completely side-laying position, but there was a bunch of wires and glued-on contacts on my head and face and a bunch of machinery stuffed up my nostrils, so I wasn't able to sleep in a way that put more pressure on them).

She then made up for this tiny admission by sarcastically noting that the wires had tipped my cup of water all over the cart - 'it's only fifteen thousand dollars worth of computer.' I refrained from pointing out that I had originally put my cup on the ledge on the other side, and that she was the one who had decided it should be moved to the cart.

She was able to reassert her position very quickly after that by directing me to the stubbornly arctic shower by which I was supposed to rid myself of the half pound of glue and interesting blue X's she'd ground into my head and face. Nobody else has ever complained about the shower being too icy. She came into my room to inform me of this, but did not put her hand into the water to check it when I ran the shower as a demonstration.

And she was right. Nobody else complained about the shower this morning. The two other people having sleep studies this morning were stoic looking older men who were very quietly sliding their way towards the elevators when I flagged them down. I asked them how they had been able to manage the cold showers.

Neither of them had used the shower.

We all washed our heads in the bathroom sinks.