One of the tests I’ve had to take recently is a sleep test. Yes, that’s right. I went down to an office building where I was hooked up to what seemed like 100 wires and filmed while I slept in an office with a bed in it. In their defense, they tried to make it seem more like a hotel room, but there was still a desk with a computer I had no access to, a TV with rabbit ears that got poor reception, and diplomas all over one wall that made it hard to forget it was still a working office. The test ran over two consecutive Sunday nights.
The first night they wired me up and filmed me. At the end of that session, I was informed that there were at least a dozen times that I had stopped breathing for several minutes at a time until my brain woke me up and told me, “Breathe, Stupid!” I must admit I had no idea I had awakened so many times, but the film and the probes attached at different areas of my head, face, neck, body and legs proved otherwise. So the diagnosis is severe sleep apnea. I have always known about sleep apnea, and to tell you the truth I’ve never understood it to be MY problem. I figured it was just a fact of life that the Farnsworth men snore—loudly, and that the women they married learned to live with and joke about it.
The second night I was again hooked up, but this time I was also hooked up to a CPAP machine that forces air through the nose and opens up some valve in the throat that is the cause of the stoppage of breath. The machine starts at a certain pressure of air being forced and is increased, after you’re asleep, until the proper pressure is found to keep that valve open and the patient breathing. The tech said she had to raise the pressure 4 or 5 times until I was finally able to keep breathing for an extended period of time.
My next visit will be with the doctor, when he will give me my own CPAP machine set to the predetermined pressure level.
Now that I’ve set the stage for my blog, I’ll get to the meat of it.
The sleep therapist’s name (the one who met me at the office both Sunday nights and hooked me up—literally)—is Sarah. While she was hooking me up, she noticed my scapular and was asking me about it. I explained what it is and what it promises to those who wear it and follow the prayer and fasting that go with it. She seemed quite interested and let me know that she was baptized Catholic and used to take her grandmother to church, but she got married to a man who went to a “different” church, and since she went to church with him, so she no longer considered herself Catholic, and really didn’t think much about any organized religion. (How I hate that statement! But that’s a topic for another blog!) We didn’t have much more time to talk before lights out and the study began, so I asked her to allow me about ½ hour to say my rosary before I went to sleep. She could see how important it is to me, so she agreed, and the test began a half-hour later.
The next visit it was like she didn’t remember our first conversation because she asked me again what that “cloth on a string” was for. I reminded her, whereupon she asked me what church I go to. I told her one of the perks to being a Catholic is that the church I attend is mostly dependent on what time I want to go to Mass. I told her that most mornings I go to the Cathedral, because Mass is at 6:30 and I can be at work by 7:15. But that sometimes I’m just too tired to get up that early, so I go to Lodi at 5:30 unless I’m feeling “South of the Border”. Then I go to St. Edward’s, where the 5:30 Mass is in Spanish.
Then we started talking about my Mom and her big 90th birthday bash coming up. She said, “Wow, she sure is lucky. The rest of us won’t have that long.”—or something to that effect. I said, “Yeah, I know what you mean. I’m feeling older every day. I don’t think I’ll make it to 90.” She replied that she meant she was afraid the world was going to end soon because everything seemed to be coming to chaos in the world.
Wham! Right away I thought about Mark, Chapter 13 but especially verses 32:37;
"But of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come. It is like a man traveling abroad. He leaves home and places his servants in charge, each with his work, and orders the gatekeeper to be on the watch.
Watch, therefore; you do not know when the lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning. May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to all: 'Watch!'"
I explained to her that the day she was born, she began to die. But when she was baptized, she began a new life in Jesus—a life that will never end so long as she keeps God’s commandments. I told her not to worry about the world coming to an end anytime soon, but at the same time she should live her life according to the commandments as if it were her last day on this Earth, because it very well could be for any of us. Who’s to say we won’t get hit by a bus today? Or simply fall over dead? Or, like my Mom live to 90, 100 or more! We simply have to trust in Him and His mercy that we will be prepared when our time comes.
I pray that my words fell on fertile ground and that the seeds I planted in her mind were fruitful and gave her some hope for her future. Please pray for this young woman. She told me that she and her husband have lost their house, their cars, and her husband lost his full time job due to the current fiscal situation in the country. Maybe that’s why she feels the way she does.
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