A Night’s Sleep Part 6

When I finally get out of the doctor’s and back to my car, a meter person is ticketing the car right behind mine, and mine would have been next since it had that white chalk mark on the tire, but I get in my car and drive off with a prescription for a sleep disorder study, another to get my cpap machine recalibrated and with an elongated uvula.  Of course I had that before I went to the doctor but didn’t really know it.

I am not sure about the surgery thing on my uvula.  As far as I am concerned hospitals are death traps.  But this would be out-patient.   And as for the uvula itself, well, I don’t know.  What the hell is it good for?  Well, we use it speaking; people who are born with no uvula have an unpronounceable condition and can’t say certain words and speak through their noses.  So the uvula plays a role in vocalization.  What if I got my uvula chopped and came out talking like Minnie Mouse.

But I don’t have to think about that till have the new sleep disorder study.  Then we will see.  In the meantime I have a prescription to get my cpap machine recalibrated to a lower level; maybe with less air pressure from the machine I won’t breathe in so much air.  So when I get back to the condo I call the place that recalibrates the cpap machine.  They are an outfit that contracts out to my HMO and are located clear down in Oxnard.

I get this person on the phone and ask when they can send somebody up to recalibrate the machine and she says, oh, we don’t do that.  You have to bring the machine in.  This means I have to drive 40 minutes down to Oxnard and 40 minutes back, and while the traffic to Oxnard is not full on LA Traffic, I would still give it a 6.5 on my scale of terrible traffic with 10 being the 405 go home traffic.

So I start getting real pissed off at this receptionist person who sounds like she is about 13 years old and doesn’t know shit from shinola.  But I am polite and say OK and just hang up.  I mean we have been through this before—about having to drive 40 minutes there and 40 minutes back—and Carol called the HMO and they got pissed and called the cpap outfit and, boy, did they change their tune real quick. They are supposed to drive up to SB but they don’t tell people that.

I am boiling because it looks as if we are going to have to go through all that crap again.  Be damned if I am going to drive down to Oxnard to have some idiot person put two fingers on two buttons on the cpap machine and in about a minute recalibrate the cpap machine.  I mean any idiot can recalibrate the machine, but there is a method to it having to do with plugging and unplugging the cord to the machine that I don’t know how to do but which I observed when the tech a while back recalibrated the machine for me.  So to get the damn thing recalibrated you have to have a doctor’s prescription and then you have to drive 40 minutes to Oxnard to have a person push down on two buttons because they don’t want you to know how to do it or the doctor would not be able to write a prescription.

So I hit the web and in about 10 minutes I pull up the official manual for my particular machine that is for the reading pleasure of the creeps in control because it tells you how to recalibrate the machine (the directions are pretty clear) and in the margin in caps and bold it says something like:  Don’t let the patients know how to do this so they won’t “tamper” with the machine.

So following the directions, I push the two buttons with my own two fingers and get the menu to recalibrate and drop the number to six ALL BY MYSELF.