A Night’s Sleep: Part 3

But I didn’t have a doctor to write me a prescription for one of those new super autocpaps.  I used to have a doctor; he was a pulmonary specialist.  He was the guy who ordered the original sleep study and prescribed the original cpap (so that my insurance paid for it).  But he was dead.  He died just a week or two before the last time I was to visit him.  I was told then by somebody that I should get another pulmonary guy to monitor my sleep apnea, as well as my newly discovered asthma and my potential lung cancer.  But I was also told they didn’t have many pulmonary guys and when you did get a guy it might take a couple of months before you could get an appointment.

I had other things on my mind and slacked off I guess.  So there I was, having had 4.5 hours sleep, burping and farting up a storm, at like 540 in the morning, with the sun not even up yet, and feeling damn frustrated because I didn’t have a doctor to write a prescription for one of those new super-duper autocpap jobs.  But I think it was later than that because Carol was up and suddenly I heard her shout, “You have lost 30 pounds!”  I was about to shout back, so, the fuck what?  When I realized she was suggesting that maybe my having lost 30 pounds of ugly, unseemly, and possibly death producing trunk weight had something to do with the fact that now for no apparent reason that I could think of I was breathing in air all of a sudden.

I didn’t know if it made physiology sense or not, but she was right about something.  I couldn’t think of anything else that had changed that could have produced a change.  Of course, I had not lost 30 pounds in six weeks (about the length of time I have been breathing in air).  I would probably have dropped dead doing that, but maybe like when I got down to 170 which happened pretty recently and which was the lowest I had been in over 15 years something had happened to provoke the wind problem.  Maybe when a person has 20 pounds of gut sticking out they tend to sleep in a different position or something.  I have no idea honestly. 

But it made some sort of sense.  I had indeed lost 30 pounds.  In fact, yesterday I weighed 164.5 on my insane digital scale.  I say insane because it’s damn erratic.  Still I think the 164.5 was corrected since I doubled checked it with the scale at the club, one of the old fashioned non-digital kind. So assuming both are accurate, as of yesterday, I weighed less than I have in 25 plus years.  I haven’t weight less that 165 since the very early 80’s which is a damn scary thought.  But then in the spring of 2006 after I got back from SC where we had buried WB in the Ora Cemetery, I weighed 202—the most I had ever weighed.  I had to buy fat pants at Costco.

So anyhow I had lost weight over a year and a half period which should have made me feel better but didn’t because the will power required not to eat was draining me of all my energy, and irony of irony, I was getting less sleep than ever because of the air problem.

So I yelled to Carol that I just had to get a pulmonary doctor or something, and what was the number.  But she called for me since she knows I get really, really irritated being put on hold.  But what do you know, she got right through, and they had an opening that very morning at 10 because they had a cancellation and wanted to know, did I want the slot.

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