Point

well-taken

We have one daughter closing out hear second year of law school at home this spring. Our dining room table has been turned into a makeshift study war room, as she has been taking her final exams.

She’s up at 4 a.m. daily and studies until she retires for the evening.

As near as I can tell, the only trait she inherited from her father is that she doesn’t sleep much.

I’ve been pretty much a lifelong insomniac, and at some point I just embraced not sleeping. When I was a kid, I would toss and turn in bed, listening to the minutes tick by. As a diversion, I would keep a transistor radio under my pillow. For as long as the nine-volt battery would last, I’d listen to AM radio. On clear nights, it opened up a whole new world. I’d listen to radio shows from St. Louis, Denver and Boston and eventually drift off to sleep for a few hours. Eventually, that transitioned into my habit of reading half the night.

I always thought that I could work third shift and many days I do now. It’s a lot easier to accomplish tasks when there’s no one else around. The world is peaceful. There are no phones ringing. The only distraction is that my AM radio habit now has changed to podcasts on my phone. The battery last longer than it did on my old transistor.

There’s an obvious downside to my schedule. The early morning world belongs to me, but I’m shot by suppertime many days. It’s been nice for my wife to have some company during times of COVID college, because she doesn’t have to listen to me snore in my recliner.

Someone once suggested that I probably have one of these sleep illnesses that could be cured by sleeping with some contraption on my face. I don’t know exactly how they work, but I know that the vast, vast majority of people I see getting these machines have what we have come to know as pre-existing conditions. They sleep lousy mainly because they’re overweight.

I went to the doctor a couple months ago because I have recurring sinus issues. At that time, the doctor gave me a list of instructions. I get infections inside my sinus cavity. I’ve suffered from it my whole life. On the list of remedies this time was to lose weight. Hey, I know I’m fat. I don’t need my ear, nose and throat specialist to pile on also.

I asked the doctor why it’s incumbent on me to lose weight to cure my sniffles but the medical industry has developed this whole new area of practice by giving people sleep machines, rather than having them lose weight.

This doctor, with multiple degrees on the wall, thought it over. “Point well-taken,” he said. “There’s a lot of truth in that.”

“But you still should lose some weight.”

Point well taken. I also probably need to get some sleep!