by Jenny Lawson
Sometime around two a.m., Ferris Mewler finally gave up and stayed upright, annoyed but resigned, as he carried an ecstatic Rory on his back and I was like, “YES! FERRIS MEWLER, YOU ARE AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL!” But then Victor opened the bedroom door and yelled, “WHAT IN THE HELL IS GOING ON OUT HERE? IT’S TWO O’CLOCK IN THE DAMN MORNING,” and Ferris panicked at all the unexpected yelling and tore off down the hall but Rory was still stuck to his back as Ferris streaked through the living room. And then Victor was like, “HOLY SHIT. WHAT IN THE HELL WAS THAT?” because I guess his eyes hadn’t adjusted to the light (or maybe to the sight of an ecstatic raccoon frolicking bareback on a house cat). I considered acting just as shocked as he was and claiming it was probably a small chupacabra that had snuck in. But then I thought that would just raise more questions so instead I lowered the camera and said, “What was what?” as innocently as possible. I prayed he’d just go away questioning his sanity, and he did, but probably less because I’d fooled him and more because he’d married someone who took secret pictures of cats wearing dead raccoons in the wee hours of the morning. It wasn’t my fault though. I’ve had chronic insomnia for as long as I can remember. These are the things that eventually happen when you’re alone at two a.m. often enough.
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(Editor: Remember three pages ago when you said you lost your arms? How have we not gotten to that yet? Did you forget that’s what this story was about?)
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(Me: I was just getting there. You can’t just start off a story about missing arms without the proper context. Apparently.)
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I finally went to sleep at three a.m., woke up a few hours later to take Hailey to school, and then crawled back in bed for a quick nap. It was lovely, but at nine thirty the alarm I’d set on my phone went off. I tried to reach over to turn it off, and that’s when I realized that my left arm was missing.
And I thought, “Well, that’s odd.”
But then I looked over at my arm and was like, “Wait, no, there it is.”
It was flung awkwardly over my head and was completely numb because Hunter S. Thomcat was lying on it and had cut off the circulation. I threw my shoulder toward the phone and Hunter grudgingly rolled over, but my arm just fell forward, zombielike. My hand almost grazed the phone but I couldn’t get my fingers to work enough to hit the snooze button. I glared furiously at my fingers like I was trying to telekinetically move an inanimate object, except that the inanimate object was my own hand. The alarm got louder and so I tried to prop myself up with my other arm but I ended up just flopping around like a fish out of water because my other arm was pinned behind me AND WAS ALSO ASLEEP. This has never happened to me before and it seemed such an astronomically weird coincidence that I started to worry that I was accidentally in some sort of partial coma that only affects arms. Or maybe I’d been selectively paralyzed, but that seemed unlikely since most people who’ve been paralyzed say “I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS” rather than “My arms stopped working.”
Hunter walked around to stare at me like “Why aren’t you turning off that noise? What is wrong with you?” which was very unhelpful. I managed to Frankenstein myself up into a sitting position and kept tossing my helpless arms near the snooze button, but it wouldn’t work and it got louder and louder and I could hear Victor angrily stomping toward the bedroom, yelling, “Oh my God, ARE YOU STILL IN BED?” I didn’t want to tell him that not only was I still in bed but also my arms weren’t even awake yet, and so I panicked and quickly rolled off the edge of the bed to hide behind it. Obviously I wasn’t thinking straight because I forgot that I didn’t have arms to help catch me and so I landed facedown with a dull thud and that’s when I realized how helpful it is to have working arms. You never think to appreciate your arms until you need them to stop the floor from punching you in the face.
Hunter S. Thomcat looked over the edge of the bed at me quizzically, as if to say, “What in the hell are you doing? Is there food down there?” and he dropped to the floor beside me to check it out. Victor burst in, yelling, “WHY IS YOUR ALARM BLARING? SOME OF US ARE ON CONFERENCE CALLS, YOU KNOW,” and I heard him huff and switch off the alarm.
I looked at Hunter like, “Shhh. Say nothing and we’ll be fine,” and he stared back at me like, “What do you mean ‘we’?”
Victor paused and I saw his feet moving toward the bathroom, where he looked for me, and then he came back in and was like, “WHERE ARE YOU?” but I stayed quiet and waited for him to leave so I could sneak out to my desk and pretend I’d been up for hours. My plan would have worked perfectly if Hunter hadn’t decided to jump onto my hip so he could peer over the side of the bed and look at Victor like, “Why are you people doing this? Is this a game?”
Then Victor walked around the bed and sighed, and I said, “NO ONE’S IN HERE,” but it sounded muffled because of the floor. He accused me of hiding from him rather than working and I said, “No, actually, I’m down here trying to save you from the sight of your disabled and temporarily paralyzed wife BECAUSE I’M TRYING TO PROTECT YOU.” Then Victor gave me what I guess was a look of pity, or maybe love. I don’t know because I was still facing the floor but I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt because that’s what marriage is all about.
I suddenly realized that all of this might make a pretty good chapter and I wanted to write it down but I still didn’t have arms to write with. So instead I said, “I’ve actually been down here working on my book but I don’t have a way to type. Can you just turn on the voice-recognition part of my phone and lay it by my face so I can dictate notes because my arms don’t work right now?” and Victor said, “Your arms don’t work right now?” and I said, “Yes. Apparently I slept wrong and lost circulation and they’re both still asleep.”
“Holy crap,” he said. “You’re so lazy that even your limbs are still sleeping while I’m talking to you.”
“Quite the contrary,” I explained as I struggled to roll over onto my back. “I’m so hardworking that I’m awake even when my body is still partially unconscious and I’m like, ‘Fuck you, arms. I’ll still be productive without you.’ THAT’S HOW DEDICATED I AM.”
I was starting to get some of the feeling back in my left arm and I lifted it to try to brush Hunter away from my nose but instead I just smacked myself in the face.
Victor stared at me with concerned resignation. “You just hit yourself.”
“It’s possible my arms might be rebelling. Just put the phone next to my face and leave me. I have important work to do here.”
He shook his head with disappointment, but he still did it and I started dictating. But the transcription app kept autocorrecting my story to something less ridiculous because even my phone was against me at that point. Then Hunter saw the words on the phone moving and he kept pouncing on it and resetting the cursor. I laid my head down on the rug in defeat as the pain of pins and needles flooded my arms, and wondered how often this sort of shit happened to Hemingway.
Victor claims these kinds of things don’t go on in normal households, but I’m pretty sure this entire incident could be blamed on the fact that I have several real-life sleep disorders. This is not too surprising considering that I collect neurological disorders like other people collect comic books. Basically I’ve become so talented at having disorders that I can literally have one in my sleep. Victor doesn’t think this is really something to brag about, but that’s probably because he doesn’t have any disorders and he’s jealous.
Jesus. It’s not a competition, Victor.
(But if it were a competition I’d be winning. Handily.)
Victor had been pushing me into doing a sleep study for years, but I’d felt it was a waste of time and money. I already knew I had a problem so I didn’t really want proof that I was fucked up even when I was unconscious.
Besides, I wasn’t the only one with sleep problems, as Victor had been talking in his sleep since he was a kid. When he was eight he was traveling with his dad and sat up in
a darkened hotel room at two a.m., opened his eyes, and raised his arm to point toward the dark hall, saying, “Who’s that man standing in the corner?” Then he lay back down and went straight back to sleep while his father quietly shit himself. Metaphorically. Probably.
A few weeks ago Victor woke himself up yelling, “LADY. YOU HAVE THE WRONG NUMBER. OUR CAT ISN’T EVEN IN THE HOSPITAL. HE DOESN’T WANT PAJAMAS.” Poor Victor. Even in sleep he’s plagued by assholes.
It might be hereditary because my dad also has major sleep issues. I never really noticed it when I was a kid because you always assume that your family is normal until you realize that no one else’s father stops people in the middle of their conversation to tell them he needs a quick nap and then lies down on their living room floor for twenty minutes to snore so loudly it sounds as if he’s the Big Bad Wolf, but in reverse. No matter where we were or who we were with, my dad would often stop, lie down, and immediately go to sleep until he’d wake himself up choking on a snore. Once, Victor took my dad deep-sea fishing during a storm and the boat was rocking like mad and there was water and blood on the bottom of the boat and everyone was seasick and Daddy said, “Well, if no one else is going to take a nap, I will,” and he lay down in the fish blood and slept soundly (but not soundlessly) for forty minutes. To Victor (and everyone else on the boat) this seemed insane, but to me it seemed normal, and I thought Victor was overreacting and should just count himself lucky that my dad had kept his pants on.
I inherited insomnia from my mom and the snoring/daytime sleepiness from my dad. I also came up with my own brand of exhaustion and choking-related awesomeness and Victor eventually said he couldn’t take it anymore and made me get help.
My doctor thought I was most likely snoring and exhausted because of the insomnia and prescribed a hypnotic sedative. It probably works really well for normal people, but the first time I took it I waited for it to make me sleepy and it never did. Several hours later Victor found me in a closet where I claimed I could see through postcards and that I’d found the fifth dimension. Victor assumed I’d had some sort of a breakdown, which is insulting because it’s entirely possible that I did find the fifth dimension and he wasn’t giving me the benefit of the doubt. Instead he just put me to bed and called the doctor, who explained that she’d forgotten to tell me that I have to go to bed immediately after I take the pill or my body will stay awake while my brain goes to sleep. She told Victor that the same thing had happened to her father (who was found wandering the front yard—wearing only socks—asking the trees why they hated him) and her mom ended up taking him to the ER because she assumed he must have had a stroke. That whole story freaked me out so I threw away the sedatives (and all hope of visiting the fifth dimension) and instead told Victor I’d go for a sleep study if he promised to stop videotaping me snoring and playing it next to me to wake me up so I could “feel his pain.”
I made an appointment with a sleep doctor, who explained that during the sleep study people would be watching me sleep and monitoring my brain waves to see how I reacted during the four stages of sleep. I’d explain those stages if I could spell all the complicated words but they basically range from “Wide awake” to “Just barely not dead.”
My sleep cycle is a bit more elaborate.
The seven stages of sleep (according to my body)
STAGE 1: You take the maximum dose of sleeping pills, but they don’t work at all and then you glare at their smug bottles at three a.m., whispering, “You lying bastards.”
STAGE 2: You fall asleep for eight minutes and you have that dream where you’ve missed a semester of classes and don’t know where you’re supposed to be and when you wake up you realize that even in sleep you’re fucking your life up.
STAGE 3: You close your eyes for just a minute but never lose consciousness and then you open your eyes and realize it’s been hours since you closed your eyes and you feel like you’ve lost time and were probably abducted by aliens.
STAGE 4: This is the sleep that you miss because you’re too busy looking up “Symptoms of Alien Abduction” on your phone.
STAGE 5: This is the deep REM sleep that recharges you completely and doesn’t actually exist but is made up by other people to taunt you.
STAGE 6: You hover in a state of half sleep when you’re trying to stay under but someone is touching your nose and you think it’s a dream but now someone is touching your mouth and you open your eyes and your cat’s face is an inch from yours and he’s like, “BOOP. I got your nose.”
STAGE 7: You finally fall into the deep sleep you desperately need. Sadly, this sleep only comes after you’re supposed to be awake, and you feel guilty about getting it because you should have been up hours ago but you’ve been up all night and now your arms are missing.
I suspected that the only stage of sleep I’d have during the sleep study would be the sleep you don’t get because strangers are watching you.
It was disconcerting right from the beginning because I went after sundown and the entrance to the clinic was literally in a dark back alley. I knocked on the locked door (which startled a homeless man who had been ironically—or possibly sarcastically—sleeping heavily) and I was fairly certain that this was the sort of place that would probably sell abortions by the dozen, but then the nurse opened the door and it was very bright and pleasant and not very abortiony at all.
They put me in a bedroom and the nurse asked if I wanted to change into pajamas. I self-consciously explained that the sweats I was wearing were my pajamas and then I felt like I was improperly dressed for sleep. Aside from that, though, it was just like being home, except for the video camera, the constant observation, the oxygen tubes up my nose, the monitors taped to my fingers, and the electrodes glued to my scalp to track my brain waves. The electrode wires were the most uncomfortable because they ran all over my head like I was a Medusa with a bunch of anorexic snake hair. The silver lining was that the weight of the wires pulled my face back like a mini-facelift and so I looked surprisingly sexy if you ignored all of the anorexic snakes on my head. The nurse continually readjusted the forehead electrodes because she said they weren’t picking up a signal and I’m pretty sure that’s an insult.
Because nothing says “sweet dreams” like electrodes and wires from ankle to scalp.
My nurse warned me that one of the patients was a sleepwalker but that if he walked into my room they’d come get him, and that was comforting in a way that wasn’t really comforting at all. After several hours of staring at the ceiling I drifted off and awoke to the sound of the woman next door screaming maniacally and I assumed she’d been stabbed to death by the sleepwalker. I shot bolt upright but the snakes in my hair were attached to the wall behind me so they jerked me back down onto the bed and I thought to myself, “Well, this is a really fucked-up way to die.”
The nurse rushed in to assure me that everything was fine and that the screaming woman just suffered from night terrors. I nodded agreeably as I watched the sleepwalker knock over a chair outside my door. I briefly considered escaping but I was lightly shackled to the bed by wires and monitors, plus the nurses and orderlies were watching me, and for a minute I realized this was probably a lot like being in a mental institution, except even crazier because we’d all come here voluntarily, like some sort of terrible slumber party for weirdos. I was certain I wouldn’t sleep again. But I must have, because at four a.m. a different nurse shook me awake and brusquely said, “You can go now. We got what we needed.” She refused to tell me exactly what it was they’d gotten and I started to suspect it was my kidneys.
I was groggy but they made me leave out the back door while it was still dark. It was like I’d had a one-night stand with a sleep clinic.
A week later my doctor had my results and informed me that I have pretty much all of the sleep disorders except for the only one that I wanted to have, which is the apnea one where they give you that headgear that shoots oxygen up your nose. I wanted it because I’m pretty sure that’s a small
er version of that oxygen chamber that Michael Jackson slept in to stop him from aging, and things seemed to work out pretty well for him.
Sadly, I didn’t have sleep apnea but I had a number of other issues. A few things that are wrong with me when I’m not even conscious:
PERIODIC LIMB MOVEMENTS DURING SLEEP: It’s like restless leg syndrome but it only happens after you’re unconscious. I’m fine with it, though, because I think that means that my legs are jogging without me, which is honestly the only way you could ever get me to jog. When I was little we had a dog that I think had the same issue because he was always running while asleep on his side and we would look at his twitchy legs and say, “Aw! He’s chasing rabbits in his sleep!” It’s pretty much the most adorable sleep disorder ever. (Except, according to Victor, my version is not so much “running adorably” as it is some sort of ongoing exorcism, what with all the “terrifying jerking and writhing about.”)
SNORING: They didn’t see me choking during the sleep study but I often wake up choking and snoring loudly, although maybe that’s because Victor’s choking me for snoring loudly. I did snore a lot though, so my doctor prescribed these clips that go inside your nostrils to make it easier to breathe, except that you have clips in your nostrils now so it actually makes it harder to breathe. I tried it exactly once, which was enough time to realize that the real snoring cure here was slow suffocation, which admittedly is a very quiet death. I also had an allergic reaction to the plugs and both nostrils swelled up. This seemed like a more economical and organic way of smothering to death, but I still prefer snoring to asphyxiation. Call me crazy.
SEIZURES: “It looks like you might have an uncommon seizure disorder but there’s no real cure for it.” I asked the doctor what the point was in even telling me about it then. “Just keep an eye on it,” he replied. I’m not sure how I would keep an eye on a disorder that only happens when I’m unconscious. I couldn’t even tell if he was being sarcastic or not.