I’ve never been a great sleeper. I attribute this in part to a childhood love of scary stories. For some reason, a lot of them seem to involve someone having their head cut off, and I developed a pathological fear of that happening to me. I would stay awake reading as long as I possibly could, until it was impossible to stave off sleep for another minute. Then I would lay on my stomach, burrow down, and cover my head with my blankets. I was pretty sure this would save me from a crazed axeman, and it became the only way I could fall asleep. We didn’t have air conditioning, and in the summers I would torment my parents about how hot and miserable our house was at night, and I found their suggestions that maybe I should sleep until just a sheet to be ludicrous. How could they possibly think a single sheet would provide me adequate protection? It seemed like I might actually have to overcome my anxiety, but then Colorado had one of the hottest summers on record. My parent’s steadfast reliance on denial and closing the blinds during the day wasn’t enough to keep our house from routinely reaching the temperature of an oven, and a central air conditioner was purchased. I could go back to sleeping the way I wanted and learn no coping skills whatsoever.
This pattern has persisted into adulthood. Although I no longer have to sleep on my stomach (a habit I had to adjust during pregnancy), pretty much all my other requirements are the same. My husband periodically suggests we develop better sleep hygiene, mainly in the form of going to bed earlier. To be supportive, I enthusiastically agree, although I have no intention of actually following through on his plan.
The coping mechanism I’ve developed to deal with my sleep anxiety, stay up until I reach total exhaustion, means that my mornings are inevitably difficult. Waking up requires the bulk of my willpower and I delay it until the latest possibly moment. For years I had a job where I had to be in at 8:00, which seemed unfairly early, but in hindsight was actually a pretty reasonable expectation for an adult. Then I had kids. When the first came along, we decided I would stay home. I thought this would solve the bulk of my issues with having to wake-up. I guess I thought that because I was pretty stupid and had no experience with infants. I didn’t get to sleep later, but I also wasn’t expected to look even remotely presentable at 9:00AM, and that did help some. Another kid would follow, and I would never again know what it was like to not be exhausted, even though staying home did confer the benefit of being able to take a nap if I wanted, and daytime sleeping wasn’t rife with the stressors of nighttime sleep.
Things might have gone on this way indefinitely, had I not developed a shrill and persistent fixation on going back to work. At work, people might scream at me, throw food, and refuse to wash hands after pooping, but at least I would be getting paid. Also, it would give me something to complain about, which made me happy. Before having kids, I’d considered going to nursing school, but my husband rightly pointed out that I might want to actually try working in a hospital first to see if I liked it. The lab was hiring, they were willing to train people on how to draw blood, and he was pretty sure he could help me secure an interview, if I was interested. Then he casually added: “The only thing is, I think the hours are kind of weird.” I didn’t mind blood, or the idea that patients would almost uniformly be unhappy to see me, but what kind of hours were we talking about? He dropped the bombshell. The shifts started at 4:00. In the morning. Which is not even real time. It’s impossible for normal people to go to sleep early enough for waking up at 3:00AM, let alone someone with an irrational fear of going to bed. But I was in too deep at that point. I had to put my proverbial money where my mouth was. Plus, maybe I’d botch my interview and they wouldn’t hire me.
Well, unfortunately only fairy tales have happy endings, which is how I found myself grimly setting my alarm for 2:45 several mornings a week. Waking people up to take their blood proved to be a very enlightening experience. Most were still half-asleep, and didn’t care what I did as long as I hurried up and finished, and also asked their nurse for more pain meds. Some were surprisingly perky, even if I’d woken them from a dead (pardon the pun) sleep. And then, and then, there was Mr. Koenig.
I encountered Mr. Koenig after I’d been working for about six months. In that time, I learned that I didn’t have the corner on the market when it came to being a weird sleeper. I saw a lot of habits that would have benefited from either a sleep lab or psychiatric counseling. But I wasn’t there to judge the weirdos who slept with literally half their body off the bed, or covered their face with three or four pillows, or seemed unbothered by sleeping while sitting straight up. I was there to get their blood quickly, efficiently, and with an appropriate amount of cheeriness. It was with this mindset I entered Mr. Koenig’s room at exactly 4:00. He was the first draw of the day, and I felt bad for him because I knew that it would probably take me two tries since I wasn’t warmed up. I liked to give patients a warning before I flipped on the lights, to give them a moment to get their bearings. I knocked on his door as I announced myself.
Although the room's main light was off, a safety light over his sink provided enough glow to easily navigate to the bed. “Good morning Mr. Koenig, I’m Maggie. I’m here from the lab to get blood.” No response. This wasn’t unusual. I said it again, a little louder. Still nothing. That was OK. If I’d learned nothing else, it was that some people were more difficult to rouse than others. I walked right up to the bed. “Good morning Mr. Koenig, I’m Maggie. I’m here from the lab to get some blood.” I was practically shouting now. Still nothing. His head was covered by the sheet. When I first started, I hadn’t thought twice about pulling blankets off people or shaking them awake, until I had a man literally start screaming in shock when I shook him, which led me to start shrieking too. The whole unsettling experience made me a lot more hesitant to touch anyone before they gave me a response. I gingerly pulled the corner of the sheet down. Mr. Koenig’s eyes were covered with squares of gauze. That was it, I’d officially seen it all. I’d seen every bizarre sleep predilection. Nothing could top this. I sighed in annoyance. It was clear that Mr. Koenig wasn’t going to respond to me. “I’ll be right back,” I told him. I tried to keep the curt edge out of my voice, but I didn’t have time for his games. “I’m going to get your nurse,” I half-shouted. I hated dealing with the nurses, who felt both overburdened and powerless, and inevitably took their frustrations out the lab techs, thus nurturing a relationship of mutual contempt and barely disguised loathing.
Outside his room, I resentfully punched the nurse’s number into my phone. She didn’t answer, of course. I stood contemplating what I should do. Behind me, a nurse breezed down the hall. “Did you just try and call me?” she asked. Yes I had, I told her. Mr. Koenig wouldn’t wake up. Would she please go in with me so we could wake him together? This was something the nicer nurses would routinely do to help us out. She looked at me quizzically. “Mr. Koenig? Oh you don’t need to draw labs on him. He expired.” I looked at her with a mixture of fury and disgust. It took every ounce of willpower not to throw my bag of supplies at her and scream, “THEN WHY DIDN’T YOU TAKE HIS LABS OUT OF THE BIN?!” Although I knew that people died in the hospital, my experience with it was still completely theoretical, and I was in no hurry to change that. She shrugged and offered a half-hearted apology before moving on to deal with her presumably alive patients. In a huff, I put his lab stickers in the shredder, and comforted myself with the knowledge that it meant one less lab for me to draw, and that my day was worse than anyone else’s so far (except possibly Mr. Koenig and his family’s) and therefore I could definitely justify having a donut at breakfast.
I told my story to my husband that night when I got home. I expected him to be, if not aghast, at least sympathetic, but he works with some of the sickest patients in the hospital and doesn’t have the luxury of just seeing the part of death where they cover your eyes with pieces of gauze, so I could tell he didn’t quite see what I was so worked up about. We sat together companionably after that, and relaxed until it was time for bed. Being up so early made me exhausted, and the day had a really put things in perspective. As long as I wasn't going to bed with gauze pads over my eyes, I could rest easy.
