Sleeping my life away

By Wayne Worcester

updated 12:40 p.m. ET May 16, 2005

I’ve never had trouble falling asleep.

I have dozed off on trains and snoozed until I missed not only my stop but my entire state. I have slumbered standing under a steaming shower and been shocked awake, looking like a candidate for a full-body Botox, when the water turned cold. My dentist has had to shake me awake to continue drilling my teeth.

It’s an odd thing, being on the verge of unconsciousness all the time.

The government has a word for people like me: dangerous. We cause roughly 100,000 traffic accidents every year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In the process, we injure about 71,000 men, women and children, including ourselves, and send 1,550 people to early graves.

So when my own misadventures in wakefulness started to include unfriendly car horns waking me at traffic lights, I figured I’d better get professional help.

Dr. Marc Kawalick, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center at New Britain General Hospital in Connecticut, had a ready smile and a vise for a handshake. His staff had told me to keep a sleep diary for a couple of weeks — a record of when I slept at night and when I felt tired by day. The doctor carefully reviewed it.

“There does seem to be a pattern,” he said, “but we’ll see.”

I took a test and was proud of scoring 23 out of 25 possible points on the Epworth Sleepiness Scale— until I learned it was like golf: Low score wins.

“And you snore, you said?”

“It wakes even me sometimes.”

One night a few weeks later, I donned pajamas in one of the center’s hospital bedrooms. The silence was dense. Some mausoleums are not as quiet. It felt unnatural, and that was before an attendant pasted 22 electrodes all over my head, face, chin, chest, stomach and legs. By the time she was done harnessing a snarl of wires to the electrodes, all of my secrets were ready for broadcast. “This is radio Worcester with the news...”

Being an experienced reporter of the human condition, I suspected that some people might not be able to sleep trussed up like a madman’s science experiment. But I knew that I would, and I did.

Kawalick also ordered a Multiple Sleep Latency Test, a monitoring of my wakefulness at two-hour intervals for the rest of the day. I welcomed such thoroughness and began to understand the expense of it. The overnight test alone could cost as much as $2,000. I was thankful for good health insurance.

I was different
It took three weeks for my results to be evaluated, more than enough time for me to ponder my lifelong problem — four decades’ worth, going all the way back to high school in Keene, N.H., in the early 1960s.

Before my father died, he made me a rock maple desk so I’d have a place of my own to do schoolwork; and this I attempted, five nights a week, while listening to Top 40 rock on my Magnavox radio. I usually picked up the countdown in the low 30s; but by the time it reached the single digits, my head slumped onto the desk, drooling onto “Macbeth,” who deserved it, or “Silas Marner,” who didn’t.

The truth that emerges through those years is this: Although I was reasonably bright, I never was going to excel at anything requiring prolonged concentration.

I fell asleep so regularly in my afternoon chemistry class that the teacher got tired of waking me. Eventually, he seated me on a high, backless lab stool, my notebook open flat across my knees. On the second day of this torment, my eyes closed and I toppled hard to the floor.

I can still see the teacher, all bone and hard angles, rimless eyeglasses under a shock of white hair; and I can hear him hoot: “Gotcha, Worcester! Now stay awake.”

He might as well have ordered me to fly.

Teachers, family, most of the adults in my life, formed a chorus: “How can you be tired at your age? Know how you spell that? L-A-Z-Y.”

I figured that everyone got as tired as I did and just handled it better. I was different, maybe inferior — too darned listless to have much hope of making my way in the world.

I wonder now what I might have learned had I been as awake as everyone else. Maybe I could have mastered more languages than English and a little Latin. Maybe I would have taken ninth-grade algebra only once. Maybe I could have understood something about physics.

All right, probably not that; but who knows?

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