Finally the dreaded day arrived - the day when I'd have to spend my first ever night in a hospital. As the hour approached, I felt increasingly sorry for myself. At the gym, I looked around at all the happy souls who'd be going home that night to their comfy warm beds. Meanwhile, I'd have twenty-four sensors taped and glued to my skull, arms, chest, lip, abdomen and legs.

The hour arrived, and I parked my car behind the hospital, and registered at the sleep center. It was only eight-thirty, two hours before my bedtime. The hospital coridoors were deserted at this hour, but in the distance I could hear the sleep technologist whistling to himself as he approached. He was a young guy, in his mid twenties. He led me to my small room with its tiny bed, and an ancient television ("purchased through a kind donation from the Vera Spanks estate") perched high out of reach. He left to setup another patient, muttering that I didn't exactly fit the profile for someone with sleep apnea (which I took to be a euphemistic way of saying, gee, you're not fat like most of our patients). And there I lay, attempting to read, wondering when the technologist would come back and wire me up for the night.

It was getting on for 9.30 by the time he returned, and it took him about an hour to attach the various electrodes and sensors to my body. All the time I'm wondering how on earth I'm expected to sleep under these circumstances. It wasn't just the sensors and the tiny bed, but also the knowledge that you'be being watched on video, and every sound is being recorded. Nonetheless, by 10.30, I dutifully switched off my light, put my book down, and lay back in the pillows, attempting to find somewhere a sense that unconciousness could somehow arrive. And only half an hour later, I was asleep. In fact, I slept about six hours, only waking up once to go to the toilet (an elaborate effort which required the technologist to come in and unplug me first), and several more times gasping for breath (the reason I was spending the night in the sleep center in the first place).

It was still dark when the technologist came to get me out of bed. The good news: I don't have sleep apnea. The bad news, they're not sure why I wake up in the middle of the night not breathing. Still, I was relieved I didn't have apnea, because the treatment for that condition is somewhat worse than the actual problem.

Sleep was on my mind a few days later when I had my regular checkup with the doctor I've been seeing for chronic fatigue. (It's probably a symptom of my age that so much of my life seems to revolve around medical conditions these days.) I only see him every three months or so now, now that I'm feeling so much better. This time I told him that I had incredible amounts of energy, and felt better than I had done in years. There was only one problem: I'm tired all the time! He scratched his head, so I went on to explain that although I had a lot of energy, I was sleeping so poorly that I also felt tired, even though I had enough energy to disregard the sleepiness. When I described my sleep pattern (falling asleep fine, but waking up for long stretches in the middle of the night), he thought it sounded like the kind of sleep that's associated with serotonin deficiency, and asked me to try taking a drug called Remerol for a few weeks, to see if it would help.

Thursday evening was the first time I took it, and, yes, I slept the whole night through without a break. The downside is that I felt groggy and hungover all day Friday (which is apparently an expected side-effect during the first week on the drug). It was an unfortunate day to feel that way, since Friday was the day that we were installing, for a customer, the big, custom software application of which I've led the development over the last few months. But everything went fine, and everybody was happy. It's probably the smoothest, most trouble-free software project I've ever worked on. There's something incredibly gratifying in creating a complex software system that does exactly what it's supposed to do; you press button A and hey-presto, screen B appears! And the timing was perfect, since I'm having my annual review next week. This year, I'm going to make a big pitch for promotion. I've been at this company now for three and a half years, and it's about time I followed the good American tradition of ascending the career ladder.

This morning, after another night on Remerol, I again felt horrible this morning - a big, fuzzy head. And I had so much planned for the day. I was to go running, and go to the gym. I was to work on my monologue for my acting session with Scott, I was to work on editing a little movie I shot last weekend. But what happened instead? I overdozed on coffee, and had to leave the gym in mid-workout, feeling dizzy and breathless. So I went shopping instead, indulging myself in a very rare spree of clothes buying. And I got NOTHING AT ALL done today! But at least I have some nice new clothes to wear.