#astronauts essay gettingold sleepapnea memoir

[barryhuff]

Reason I Know I'm Getting Old #51-- "Astro...not"

I hate the movie Star Wars.

Well...I don’t actually Hate it. In fact, one summer, my brother and I bragged about watching the movie 47 times on HBO.

I even have a favorite scene -- "The Bar Scene", of course. Especially the part in which a handsome, tanned, mischievous Han Solo (brown, feathered hair parted evenly in the middle) tries in vain to smooth-talk the twitchy-trigger-fingered, reptilian, green-faced, bug eyed, intergalactic thug Greedo (bald head).

Hell, reciting Greedo’s opening line to Han for anyone who’d listen (“Oo-nah too-tah, Solo?”) is still one of my favorite nerd past-times.

What I actually hate about Star Wars is how easy characters cover vast distances in the dark, dusty, intensely cold, INFINITE vacuum of space. It’s as easy as a con-artist pulling a few levers, saying, “Punch it, Chewie”, and going faster than light without having to even buckle his seatbelt.

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I loved being a groupie for my kids’ high school band. My job as groupie…uhh, band booster was to pass out water bottles to the hardworking, sweaty student musicians dressed in heavy polyester uniforms designed for 1940s bellhops. During halftime, I would help lug out the drum major’s platform -- no easy feat. When the halftime performance was complete, I would drag the same platform out of the stadium to be stowed on the band’s truck.

Once a year, I would look forward to the game in which my children’s school played district rival, Sam Houston. Sam Houston was a school known in the San Antonio area for their high-stepping routines, bodies swaying, proud and loud low brass, pounding basses, fancy capes, and the best stadium public address announcer in San Antonio.

The young lady on the microphone didn’t simply explain what the band was going to play. Woven throughout Sam Houston’s performance (which by itself had expectant fans screaming like they paid for a Michael Jackson concert in which he threw hundred dollar bills at the audience) are her syrupy, layered, rhythmic chants reminding spectators that tonight is their night to groove in the stands as hard as the band.

Add to it her extraordinary sign-off, “Everybody wants to be Sam Houston, until it’s time to BE Sam Houston!” __________________

To me, when I look up at night, space seems to be so empty and lonely. Our sun is 93 million miles away. When written like a math problem, the 93 million even looks intimidating.

93,000,000.

It looks like “93” with six stone-faced bodyguards in tow.

The Earth’s moon is 238,000 miles away. It took Neil Armstrong and the fellas six days to get from Earth to the moon and back. And they did it while being cooped up in what seemed like a good-sized, flying port-a-potty. Their spacesuits looked about as comfortable as wearing every outfit in the average American’s good-credit-infused, stuffed closet AT ONCE.

And to top it off, they had to wear confining helmets.  It helps to breathe, I suppose.

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I snore loudly.

But it’s not the snoring that has my wife throwing angry elbows directed at my spine at night, it’s my erratic breathing patterns. It’s official diagnosis is “Sleep Apnea”. Because I spent a life eating harder than the average man needs to, and exercising less than the average man should, I have unusual breathing patterns as I sleep.

I’ll stop breathing momentarily.

So far, my body automatically corrects this by desperately inhaling oxygen to avoid asphyxiation. This generates a sound that roughly resembles a garbage disposal trying to rip up the remaining bites of dinner. Now imagine having to hear this drama dozens of times a night.

After my wife pleaded her case, a sleep-study, and my routinely sore, beaten back, I ordered a CPAP machine.

It looks like scuba-gear built in a junkyard. My nostrils and mouth are covered by what appears to be a jock-strap cup. From the “cup”, a hollowed plastic “jock-strap” forks around my ears, ultimately wrapping around the top of my head. From there, a long, plastic tube feeds into what looks like a 1980s transistor radio.

The “transistor radio” forces measured doses of air through the tube, and up into my nose to keep my breathing regular, my wife’s sleep uninterrupted, and (thankfully) my back free from one-sided boxing matches.

But there is a problem: sometimes during the night, without me consciously knowing it, I remove the mask. The mask is uncomfortable. The jock-strap often has to be repositioned during the night. If I want to snuggle with my wife, the cup on my mouth has tiny air-vents that shoot out excess air at my wife’s head.

From my wife’s perspective, my apnea is so awful, cold jets of air aimed at her closed eyelids, moistened with saliva from my gap-mouth sleeping, is infinitely better than life without the sleep machine. For me, I feel it’s annoying to her, so I don’t get to snuggle.

Just think, astronauts endured hours and days wrapped like canned biscuits in their waking and sleeping hours. I can’t even regularly wear life-saving equipment in my sleep only.

Imagine Neil Armstrong moments after descending from his lunar lander saying these words, “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind -- except for that fool, Barry Huff, who took his helmet off upon exiting the lander, causing his fat, space guts to spray on my space suit. So now I’m going to have to use some of these moon rocks and space dust to mop up this mess!

Everyone wants to be an astronaut, until it’s time to BE an astronaut.