Hi Darling Ones,

Wanna know why I cried at my sleep study Tuesday? Here goes.

“How tall are you?” Zack the sleep study tech asked as he reached up the leg of my pajama pants to grab the wires I had shoved down the top of my pants.

“Six five,” I said.
“That’s tall,” he said.

I nodded. Why could I say? I’ve had this conversation roughly 398,195 times in my life with everyone from strangers at the grocery store to professors to bosses to creepy men stalking me through Target. Yes, 6’5″ is tall for any human, especially a woman. As one doctor told me as a teen, I’m a statistical anomaly.

Zack continued wiring me up. Taping wires to my rib cage and my legs. As I sat in a chair in front of him, he rubbed a gritty cleaning paste on my scalp and attached wires to my head with a sticky goo.

“I’m sorry,” he said at one point, eyeing the bed I was to spend the night in. “The medical world is not built for you.”

What? I could hardly believe my ears. A healthcare working blaming the world and not my unruly body? What? Usually, it’s my fault I don’t fit. My fault my legs and arms are too long. My fault my hips too wide.

Never in my fifty-two years has any medical person at all told me that the medical world was at fault for my not fitting.

I quickly blinked back tars, thankful he couldn’t see me. Then I made a joke about a ding dong woman filming someone at the DNC with her license in full view from her iPhone case on CNN. Because of course I did.

A little later in the evening he announced, “The whole world isn’t built for you, is it? I bet shower heads are kind go a pain.”

Then I told him about my teeny shower that’s so narrow that if I drop something I have to get out of the shower to get it. The top of my head to my waist is longer than the shower is wide.

Because Zack was so rad, knowing he was going to watch me sleep wasn’t as creepy as it originally seemed. And he really did watch me! At one point in the night I rolled over and before I even settled back on the pillow he was in the room giving me a CPAP mask before I fell back to sleep.

I didn’t think I’d sleep that well, but had to be woken up at 9:40 because my ride was supposed to be there at 10. A+ in sleeping?

Darling Ones, I’m doing my damndest to stay alive and right now that involves wearing an itchy heart monitor for the next two weeks. Putting this thing on involved shaving part of my chest and then abrading my skin with medical-grade sandpaper. I’d rather do eight more sleep studies then have to abrade my skin again and then promptly clean it with alcohol wipes. Youch.

Between the heart monitor and the continuous glucose monitor I’m like 23% of the way to being a robot.

Eep-Opp-Ork-Ahh-Ahh,
Jodi