Sleep tests for snorers have been suspended at a world-famous private hospital in London. The reason: the equipment used to monitor patients sleep was louder than their snoring, making sleep impossible. I should know: I have spent a sleepless night at the King Edward VII Hospital, the exclusive medical establishment attended by the Queen and military officers.
Sometimes I snore and stop breathing in my sleep. It's a condition called "sleep apnoea", a serious and potentially life-threatening illness if untreated. I also had weird "out-of-body" experiences on many nights. Snoring affects almost half the British population. But a smaller number also have sleep apnoea. There can be different causes; in my case it was a pituitary disease called acromegaly.
A sleep test was ordered to investigate the nature of my problem. Unfortunately, it was a farce. At 11pm, when I was ready to snooze, the nurse didn't know how to set up the monitoring equipment. She started banging it and asked me if I knew how it worked. I didn't.
She then asked how tall I was. I replied: "5ft 10." "What is that in centimetres?" I didn't know. She then asked for my weight in kilograms, which I did know. Then I got into bed and was tethered to various wires connected to a computer.
When I looked at the computer screen, I saw that my height had been put down as "five". "What does that mean?" I asked the nurse. "That's your height," she replied. "But it says five. I am not five. What measurement is it in?" I asked her. "Centimetres."
"You have told the computer that I am five centimetres tall?" "I'm sure it doesn't matter," said the nurse. "Doesn't matter? What's the point of the exercise if it doesn't matter? You have told the computer that I am 85 kilograms in weight and five centimetres tall. The computer will do its calculations based on an extremely short but incredibly wide dwarf."
The nurse pondered for a while, then disconnected me from the computer, stood me against the wall, and handed me a tape measure. Have you ever tried to measure your height on your own? It is not easy, especially at midnight, when I am supposed to be rested for an overnight sleep study. But, after eventually completing the exercise, I was reattached to the computer and told to go to sleep.
I tried. I really tried. But 15 minutes later, there was a whooshing noise, a constriction in my right arm, and another whooshing noise. It was the blood-pressure cuff affixed to my right arm. It was scheduled to go off every 15 minutes through the night. I can't sleep through that! What was I supposed to do, have 14-minute naps interrupted by the snoring blood pressure unit? If that weren't bad enough, every 10 minutes, the computer started to whistle at me.
At 3am the nurse came in again. "Jonathan, are you asleep?" she asked. Of course I wasn't. So she started talking to me.
The next morning, after an entirely sleep-free night, another nurse came in. "Good morning, Jonathan!" she exclaimed brightly. Then she leaned over the bed and whispered: "Jonathan, I have heard all about your out-of-body experiences." "Oh yes?" I replied.
She leaned over a little more. "Can I ask you, Jonathan, why you came here for these tests?" "Well," I replied, "I have often been tired and without much energy."
She looked around to check that no one else was in the room. She then started to talk in a low, conspiratorial voice. "I shouldn't be telling you this. But I know a bit about out-of-body experiences," she said. "Let me give you some advice. All that flying about at night is bound to make you very tired."
Later on my doctor reported that there was no evidence that I had sleep apnoea. It made me realise what a joke some tests can be. There was no evidence of sleep apnoea that night because there was no evidence of any sleep! The exercise had cost £400. Now that's something else to keep me awake at night.
This week the chief executive of the King Edward VII's Hospital, the Brigadier Colin Harrison, OBE, said, "I accept that the conduct of your sleep study was poorly managed. I have suspended sleep studies in the hospital pending an internal review."
He has refunded the £400 cost of my sleep test and paid £600 in compensation, from which I shall make a donation to the Pituitary Network Association (www.pituitary.org), an international patient-led charity for people with pituitary illness.
