Sleep? Study?

I can sleep or I can study, but turns out I can't do both at the same time.

This was me, Friday night, wired up for a sleep study. (I'm relatively pinkish in that picture because I was having a mild allergic reaction to something--the soap in the sleep study bedroom, I think--and I couldn't take an antihistamine or risk screwing up the study maybe.)

I have trouble sleeping under the best of circumstances (in my own bed, with my own blankie, able to read--sometimes for hours--until I drop off). This set up (covered in more than twenty electrodes and wires, in an unfamiliar bed, three cameras watching me, imposed darkness at an arbitrary bedtime). You can see one of the cameras in the upper left side of the photo. (There was another in on the opposite side of the room.)

That is not my futon. That is a very uncomfortable bed made up with sheets that felt kind of like parchment paper, only more stiff, and a blanket that was not unlike the ones that my middle school used to cover sick students in the nurses' office. (Yes, I went to public school when there were still such things as school nurses.) The patient in the next room coughed all night and buzzed for the technician several times to get up to go to the bathroom and I could hear it all; The rooms are not sound-proof by any means.

With the help of a pre-approved dose of melatonin, I managed to sleep for just over two hours, from one a.m. until just after three a.m., when I woke up thinking about plant genetics and then tried to get back to sleep by downing another dose of melatonin and playing a boring game on my phone. After two hours of that, the technician came in and asked if I just wanted to get up, so I did.

I'm supposed to get my results week after next or perhaps the week after that, maybe from the sleep doctor or maybe from my own doctor, maybe via a phone call or maybe through a follow-up appointment. (The tech was very unclear about how results were to be delivered.)