someone will watch over me in my sleep tonight.

unfortunately no real flesh and bone bloke like my boy - i'll be sleeping with a somnocheck sleep monitor strapped to my upper body. - there's a home sleep screening test at my place tonight.

i just picked the monitor up at the pneumologists office and got instructions on how to wear it. the monitor will be strapped around my body, connected to a nasal tube (which i will have to tape to my face. great.) and a pulse & blood oxygen monitor on my finger.

the little thing will be measuring my breathing, oxygen saturation, pulse and body position and can therefore enable my doc to diagnose apnea, hypopnea, oygen saturation issues and heart irregularities.

why, you may wonder, all this trouble? you know (big confession), i snore.

me being a 24 year old, very fit, normal-weight range female. yup.

obviously, i don't know how severely i snore: i've never heard myself snore (apart from once when i fell asleep during mediation and woke up because of the sound coming from my throat), but all fromer and current bed partners have assured me that i do (usually with appropriate comments on how cute it is), but it ain't right, so i'm doing something about it. - not just because snoring can be unhealthy in the long run (leading to heart problems), but also because i hate the idea of my bed partner(s) suffering.

my ent thinks the reason behind my snoring is my upper palate. it's apparently floppy.
20 years ago, i had my tonsils removed, and they apparently didn't operate that well. so i ended up with a floppy palate. the hypothesis is that it flops in the airflow when i breathe while sleeping, which causes the snoring.

so i'm getting my floppy palate toned. with radiowaves, baby!
my ent plans on using the celon method on me, which would involve injecting my upper palate in 4 to 6 different places with a needle like instrument that sends low level radiowaves, causing coagulation in these places. within 6 weeks, the coagulated areas scar internally, firming and lifting the palate up. think facelift for the back of my mouth.
the procedure should take 15 minutes, at the dosc office, using local aneasthesia, and the results should last a few years, too.

however, my ent, good doc that he is, won't do the op on me without being sure i actually "snore habitually" and am not suffering from sleep apnea. the latter would suck, muchly.
evan has been worried about it, actually. while he never witnessed any apnea episodes, he thought that my constant falling asleep in australia was reason enough to worry (i think he failed to realise though, how disrupted my sleep was, sleeping in living rooms for weeks, for 5 hours a night, tops).
i'll know soon enough for sure: i'll be wearing the monitor tonight, will hand it back in on monday, get the results on tuesday.
if i indeed snore habitually (and of course i worry that i won't snore tonight and whether i will be able to sleep between midnight and 8 when the monitor will be running), i'll get my palate radiowaved at the end of next month.

exciting.

funny moment with the doc showing me how to wear the monitor: he was strapping the thing round my body, loudly wondering whether they had any smaller straps because i'm so "small", telling me i was the oddest patient for this he has ever had - neither male, nor fat, nor over 50.

and he called me dainty.

dainty.

that's a first. and probably almost accurate when you compare me to the huge snoring blokes over 50 he usually treats.

he.