On New Year's Eve, Ginger and I had dinner together as we watched Independence Day, which was released three decades ago. One can only imagine how many times I have seen that movie in the ensuing years.

Dr. Brackish Okun was a director at Area 51. He was in charge of experimenting on captured space aliens.

Dr. Okun

Dr. Okun’s persona isn’t what one would imagine a director at Area 51 would look like, or maybe it is. When the president and the top brass want to visit an alien in Area 51 during the attack of the alien creators, he is all excited and takes them to his top-secret lab. Okun explains to the visitors at Area 51, “Is it just me, or is this whole situation starting to feel like an Edgar Allan Poe story? You aren't planning on locking us inside those doors, are you?”

Okun shows the delegation a supposedly dead alien, which attacks him with one of its long tentacles, strangling him to death.

That is the backstory of my recent sleep study. I have had several sleep studies, one in a hospital setting and a couple of tests in my home. They were designed to address a nagging medical problem that I have had for years...I’m dead tired all the time. I have sleep apnea while asleep at night. My breathing stops, which can cause major medical problems like going belly-up if my breathing doesn’t automatically restart. I use a CPAP at night, and it records the number of times I stop breathing per hour, which ranges from 1 to 4 times per hour. The CPAP merely provides a constant supply of air to be on the safe side.

In addition to sleep apnea, I have Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS), also called Willis-Ekbom disease. While sleeping, my legs move a great deal, which I'm not aware of. But during the sleep study, they tape-record my sleep activity. A sleep test includes a CPAP along with a dozen electrodes connected to my head, abdomen, and legs. The combination of a CPAP and electrodes, along with the tape-recording of my body movements, will assist my doctor in determining why I am so tired all the time and how to address that issue.

My local hospital has a sleep lab very close to my home. I drove to the lab, and the tech took me to my bedroom for the night. I walked into the room, which was huge, 5 times larger than my bedroom, and the bathroom was also huge. The tech connected the electrodes to my body. I got into the bed, and she connected the electrode wires to a large box located near my head. Then she gave me the mask for the CPAP.

There I was with the CPAP on one side of me and the electrode connection box on the other. Then she wished me a good sleep and left. I was in total darkness. I couldn’t see anything at all. The entire room was pitch-black. The only light in the entire room was a small red light on the ceiling, which indicated, I guessed, that the videotaping was working.

For someone complaining about being tired all the time, it took me a long time before I finally dozed off. I was concerned about moving due to the wiring of electrodes all over my body, plus the CPAP tubing. Finally, I dozed off. However, I awoke in the middle of the test. I had moved around so much while sleeping that the plastic hose between the CPAP and the mask had wrapped around my neck. I wasn’t having any problem breathing, but the tubing wrapped around my neck was uncomfortable enough to awaken me.

So, I disconnected the tubing from my mask, unwound the tubing around my neck, and reconnected it to the mask. That took less than 10 seconds to complete the process, and I went back to sleep.

When Ginger and I watched Independence Day on New Year’s Eve, the scene where the alien’s tentacle wrapped around Dr. Okun’s neck resonated with me.