Sleepless in Indianapolis

I’ve been to a sleep clinic before, so I didn’t think I would be surprised by much during my visit last night to Billy-Bob’s Sleep Clinic and Tire Care Center in Indianapolis, but I was wrong. I was working on the apparently false assumption that people in the business of studying sleep and sleep disorders would know a little something about sleep. Again I was wrong, very wrong. The absurdity of it all is impossible to put into words . . . but I will try nevertheless. I know it is medicine, but try to remember who the customer is in this transaction as you follow along.

First there was the paperwork. Most places will conduct an interview when you arrive and put your information into a computer. At Billy Bob’s, they opted not to waste resources on newfangled data storage devices or personnel, and decided to co-opt my time instead with several poorly designed forms. I can understand the need for my name and Social Security number on these various forms, but why do I have to give them my phone number, home address, spouses name, and in fact the same information on all four different forms in differing orders?

Feeling frisky, I inquired as to why I was providing the same information several times and was told that it was because the Doctors wanted it that way. When I asked the poor soul doing the intake whether there was any consideration of what the customer wanted, in this case me, he disappeared. His replacement was a very large fellow that would be my antagonist for the remainder of my stay at Billy-Bob’s. And of course he had yet another form that again asked for the exact same information in yet another order. He also had another document with him in very fine 8pt type roughly the same length as the Magna Charta and he seemed annoyed that I would have the poor taste to actually pull out my glasses and read it to his accompanying toe-tapping and multiple glances at his watch.

This well crafted document basically said that while I was at Billy-Bob’s, they were free to snoop into my medical records (I thought they were supposed to be adding to them), that they could pretty much kill me as I slept and I would have no recourse other than to take the matter to an arbitrator of their choosing (probably Billy-Bob’s Arbitration and Hair Care), and that I agreed to pay for their services no matter how much they charged (here as everywhere else in the medical profession, nobody at Billy-Bob’s had the slightest clue how much they charged for their services) Apparently put off by what he perceived as a trick question, my gorilla sized attendant retreated to regroup and to file these new forms in whichever pigeon hole they belonged.

I changed into my Spiderman sleeping attire (with matching undies!) and settled into what would be my torture rack for the evening. Most sleep clinics use hotel beds in order to give their clients a reasonable chance to get a night’s sleep that closely approximates a normal night’s sleep at home. At Billy-Bob’s, customer comfort isn’t a consideration. I was given a bed that had obviously been usurped from the emergency room. I know that because it was a perfect example of the kind of firm hard surface upon which one performs CPR. With a sleep number approaching if not exceeding 100, this bed approximated a concrete slab with an old camp cot mattress thrown on top of it. When I pointed this out to the beefy attendant, he said the other beds were even worse. Not wishing to further provoke him after my previous demonstrations of reading and reasoning ability, I resigned myself to this miniature slab for the evening and took him at his word.

I flipped on the television and scanned the channels. I found FOX news and decided to be grateful for this singular creature comfort thus far offered. While I watched the boob tube, my burly caretaker came in and fussed endlessly getting dozens of wires attached to various locations about my head and body. We chatted during the process and he seemed to relax a bit and so did I. After watching TV for a couple of hours, my handler returned and turned off the TV. When I told him I could not fall asleep without a TV on, he told me to try anyway. I asked him why the TV had to be off and he informed me that the glow from it interfered with the videotape they were taking of me. He was again put off when I asked him why interfering with the videotape was of greater significance than interfering with my ability to get to sleep, which was the point of the whole exercise after all.

I tried to negotiate a compromise that made perfect sense to me. “Why not just set the sleep timer? The video tape of me laying here awake isn’t of much value is it?” He then confessed that at Billy-Bob’s, they didn’t have sleep timers on their television sets. “This is a SLEEP clinic isn’t it?” I asked incredulously. All I received in reply was a shrug. Apparently Billy-Bob’s was eschewing state of the art (circa 1980) equipment, finding it an unreasonable accommodation. After wasting about an hour and a half monitoring a wide awake, and somewhat pissed off patient, my handler relented and let me turn the TV back on.About a half an hour later, I drifted off to the only sleep I would have that night.

In my previous visit to a sleep clinic, they were very conscious of lighting and took great pains to illuminate the room with indirect light from below so the staff could see well enough to do their tasks without waking the patient. Billy-Bob’s took another tack. The lighting in the room consisted of two 500 watt can lights focused on the bed (and in the patient's eyes) and the regulation 5,000 watt fluorescent standard lighting. There was no other lighting available in the room. I discovered this when I had to go to the bathroom about an hour after I finally went to sleep. When I tried to rise to go to the bathroom, I was somewhat disoriented by the plethora of wires attached to me. My sentinel came immediately and, you guessed it, completely blinded me with a thousand watts of can lights right in my eyes. While he busied himself with disconnecting me from the monitoring equipment, he should have been thankful that I had my Spidy Undies on. as I briefly considered wetting the bed in retaliation.

Thoroughly awake now, I went to the bathroom and returned to be reattached to the Matrix. I laid there until about four thirty or five o’clock fuming and as wide awake as I’ve ever been. The sentinel returned, apparently taking it as an affront of some kind that his resetting of my circadian clock was preventing me from sleeping. I informed him I was unable to sleep and there was no point in continuing this farce any farther. “Get me out of this rig, I’m going to go get some breakfast,” I told him. His condescending response was, “So you want to discontinue the test?” I considered his inability to absorb my common sense tips thus far and decided that explaining it to him would only upset him further and lengthen my time until breakfast, so I let it pass. I’m sure he noted somewhere that I was uncooperative, since I was unable to overcome his monumental efforts to prevent me from sleeping. So be it. At least this unbelievable incompetence was finally at an end. I went ahead and went about my day; the condition inflicted by my captors a reminder of how I used to feel when I actually had a sleep apnea problem.

So if you ever want to waste an entire night being continuously aggravated at what I assume are premium prices for absolutely incompetent service by the most clueless staff on the planet, I heartily recommend Billy-Bob’s Sleep Clinic and Tire Care Center. It won’t contribute an iota of medically useful information, but how many other chances do you get to wear your Spidy undies? Personally, I think the money would have been better spent going to Hawaii for a good spanking by a nice Polynesian girl.

Scottie