My father took sick when I was 17. A strange shortness of breath that was, ultimately, never fully explained. At some point, after his first heart surgery perhaps, he had needed to go on oxygen.
These days, you can get these compact backpacks. But Daddy had to drag his in a little cart, made specifically for the tank. The green head of the tank was difficult to miss. I had to change places in the back seat so that it could sit behind him in the car.
At home, he had a huge machine that supplied oxygen. It was quiet but not silent, and a low hiss pervaded the house. His tubing snake through the hallway. We had to put a sign on the door warning “no smoking oxygen in use.” He had given up smoking prior to all that, but Mom still smoked, so she had to leave and travel far away for her smoke breaks.
In the ICU after his second surgery, I noticed his oxygen tube had been inserted upside down. My sister reached over and fixed it, commenting that his “hinder was nakey,” since his gown had come open in the back.
After his third (and final) surgery, he was back in the ICU, a private room this town; I remember it as being dark but I don’t know if that’s real. He wasn’t on oxygen, but a ventilator. A dialysis machine, too. All his organs shutting down.
It takes time, or at least it did then, to shut off the machines after a person dies. He was dead, in every measurable way, but the ventilator was still live, still supplying those even breaths.
So getting my CPAP was a little scary. Not only was I exhausted and ready to try anything, I clearly needed it. The machine doesn’t breathe for the patient. It doesn’t even supply oxygen. It just supplies regular old air, nitrogen and oxygen and all the little ones.
My original CPAP wasn’t very loud, and my current one is quieter still. My tubing is nothing like my father’s. The machine has little in common with that huge one Dad needed. But still. Breathing is one of the most basic, normal, natural things a human can do. And then your body fails in ways you don’t expect.
That’s what claws at me about insomnia. I wonder if Dad felt that, too. Sleeping, breathing, those are innate. Our body is supposed to be able to run those systems on autopilot. You don’t need to think about every breath or blink, you just do it. But something in the programming crashed. I have to think a lot about sleeping, and making sure I can breathe when I sleep. Daddy went from being a normal guy to having trouble walking around his office to needing a machine to needing multiple machines.
Babies can do this. Why can’t I?
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