EEG

26 October 2007

I went up to London for an EEG yesterday. To a hospital, you understand, it wasn’t done in the middle of Trafalgar Square or anything. Just as well really, because an EEG involves the patient’s head being measured, drawn on and covered with little electrodes, stuck on with pale green conductive paste and that kind of look doesn’t go down so well in public.

I’ve had a couple of EEGs before, one sleep, one not. Both involved looking at a very bright strobe running at different speeds and a couple of minutes deep breathing, which over-oxygenates your brain and makes you feel horrible. The sleep EEG then had the added bonus of taking a sleeping tablet, curling up under a blanket and having a snooze. One assumes that further tests were then performed, but I was asleep at the time, so I couldn’t swear either way.

Yesterday’s EEG was a sleep EEG and I was expecting to do all the strobe and breathing malarky before my nap. However, once wired up to the machine I was told that, no, this was pretty much just a case of sleeping. I lay on the bed for a few minutes and was told to shut my eyes. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? Yet I found a way to make it complicated, because OH MY GOD my eyes just wanted to open. All my strength was going into keeping them shut. I imagine the electrodes stuck to the “wild nonsense” part of my head were working overtime at this point.

The first tests done, just a couple of flashes from the strobe, the technician brought me a sedative, three little capsules in an envelope. If I was also being scored on my ability to pick up said capsules, I probably scored about 4/10. Slippery little buggers they were. I took the sedative, 9mg of melatonin, lay back and shut my eyes again. The lights were turned off and I was told the drug would take 10-15 minutes to work.

I lay there for what felt about a week, quite clearly not going to sleep. Thoughts about this and that were running at high speed through my mind and once or twice I even had to divert my attention from scenes from “Friends” that had flitted into my head, which put me at risk of bursting out laughing apparently at nothing. As I gradually relaxed noises inside and outside the hospital kept jolting me just enough to make me wonder if I was ever going to get to sleep. Ambulance sirens, my own busy mind, a relatively light room, traffic, cold feet, electrodes tugging on my scalp and sharp voices in the corridor outside were all working against me.

The strobe flashed.

Shit.

I’m not asleep yet. Does he know I’m not asleep yet? How should I let him know I’m not asleep yet? What if I’m about to fall asleep and moving would wake me up further? WHAT SHOULD I DO? Should I say something? Would that ruin the test?

I know.

I’ll just scratch my side and move my feet. Those are conscious movements and will show I’m not asleep.

“All done,” the technician said, “You managed a small sleep.”

Oh. I did? Ok, so how delighted am I that I chose not to say “I’m still awake” just then?

All my wires were removed and a cursory attempt was made to remove the paste from my hair. Still I left the department with the same bouffant mess that everyone does. The results of the EEG will be known in about a week, so we shall see just what my temporal lobe thinks it’s doing. In the meantime though – and don’t say/read this without knocking on wood – this month I had no funny feelings at all.