Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

I've been sleeping with my CPAP machine for a month now, and, I think, finally getting used to the mask.

Just in the past several days, I'm starting to have regular nights in which I manage to sleep through the whole night without having to get up and remove the mask for a few minutes to give my nose a break. These nights are good: I wake up feeling more rested than I have in a long time. I think I'm just getting used to the mechanical pressure on my nose. It does seem to take several weeks to get to that point.

My apnea event counts have settled into a strange pattern: in a typical night on the machine I only have about 5-6 events/hour, sometimes as low as 3, a level the app/website seems to consider "minimal". But there's still the odd night in which it jumps up to about 14: notably, the whole time we were at the hotel in NH, but it sometimes happens at home too. I think it might just have to do with whether I'm on my back or my side for most of the night. I still feel tolerably rested in the morning after these incidents; I presume the CPAP is powering past them well enough to keep me asleep.

I definitely don't need to switch to a nose-and-mouth face mask. I'm still wondering if should switch to one with "nasal pillows" (nostril-cushions sort of like earbud inserts), but I don't know if it'd fix the problems I have with my skin breaking out around the contact points--it might just change the pattern. Something that seems to help a lot is washing just the nose piece with dish soap much more frequently than they tell you to, every couple of days, to keep it clean and free of accumulating grease, and one advantage of the design I'm using is that it's very easy to clean. (I have a bunch of spare nose pieces, so I don't have to worry too much about destroying it this way.) My nose and upper lip seem to be getting tougher around the contact area, so I should probably give it more time first.

Over the past few years, I gradually came to realize that I have obstructive sleep apnea. I hadn't had a really good night of sleep in years; I often woke up several times a night; Sam complained that I snored like a sawmill, and would sometimes actually hear my breathing stop entirely for a while. My symptoms generally resembled those of a whole bunch of people I know here and elsewhere who have sleep apnea, and got some relief from using a CPAP, a machine that blows air into you all night through a face mask. The idea is that the positive pressure can help keep the airway open, and the machine can even detect an apnea event and force the airway open by increasing the pressure.

So I wasn't surprised when, at my last physical, the NP quizzed me and recommended that I do a sleep study. This turned out to be, not a visit to a sleep lab, but a much cheaper at-home thing I did by borrowing a sleep monitor from Lawrence General, and sleeping with its pulse oximeter stuck on my finger and a cannula up my nose. That turned out to be kind of difficult, but I guess I got enough hours of fitful sleep that way for them to tell that there was something going on. (They also figured out that I had some pretty terrible acid reflux that needed treatment, and that's helped my sleep too, among other things.)

What followed was a month of fighting with my insurance company, who apparently thought I wasn't sick enough for them to pay out, but the sleep specialist my doctor referred me to eventually successfully badgered them into playing. So a couple of weeks ago a nice person from the CPAP dealer actually made a home visit and gave me my shiny new machine.

Hardware

This is a ResMed model that has a cellular modem in it, the main purpose of which seems to be for the insurance company to spy on my sleeping habits so they can stop paying out if I'm not using it. There was a scary article about this going around recently; it's absolutely true, but the dealer did tell me the parameters up front: I have to use it at least 4 hours a night for 21 nights a month, which is not exactly onerous and would occur naturally if I'm making any effort at all to actually use it. It's a rent-to-own deal where the machine is eventually going to be mine, but it needs regular replacement masks and such. 

The CPAP itself is a surprisingly quiet machine (I'd worried there was going to be some loud fan, but it's not really audible). It's about the size of a large bedside clock radio, but heavier, with a built-in humidifier that needs to be filled with distilled water every day or two. There's a start/stop button on top, a phone-sized display screen on the front, and a dial that clicks in that's used to manipulate the menu system. I'm not allowed to mess with the air-pressure settings (these are prescription-specified), but I can adjust the temperature and humidity of the air that comes out. It turns out that these controls are worth fiddling with: I seem to do best with warmer and slightly drier air than the defaults they left me with.

The base unit is connected by a long hose to the mask, a clever Philips model made of clear silicone rubber, where the hose connects at a swiveling joint on the top of my head, the better to lie down with. The head harness consists of flattened hoses going down both sides of my face to connect at a piece that fits under my nose (all held on with a Velcro/foam rubber strap in back). I like that there isn't a big cup over my nose and/or mouth, which many CPAP masks have, but the bottom of my nose does sometimes get a bit sore and pimply from this thing pressing up on it.

I was a bit apprehensive initially about the mechanics of this: how do you breathe out? What if the machine stops working? The mask isn't completely airtight, though: aside from the hole that goes under the nostrils, the nose-piece has another little port in front for venting air, and there's also a bunch of vent holes on the hose connector. Breathing through your nose with a non-working mask on is entirely possible, though it becomes much easier when the machine is on. The machine seems to sense when you're inhaling and dials up the pressure then, at least if you take a deep breath.

Getting used to it

So... how is it to sleep with this thing? Does it work? Well... it's a process. The mask was weird and uncomfortable at first. They suggest that it might take weeks to fully acclimate to wearing the mask at night. I've had plenty of bad nights when I woke up at least as many times as before the CPAP, and didn't actually get much sleep. These aren't completely over yet. But I've noticed that on the nights when I do sleep (last night was a good one), I wake up in the morning feeling distinctly better, less kicked-in-the-head than I used to. I think the first noticeable benefit was just that I'm breathing filtered air, so whatever allergens are about at night don't bother me any more. This aspect will probably help a lot in the spring.

The strangest thing about wearing a nose-only mask is that you still can't really talk with it running: if you open your mouth for any reason, there's a bizarre sensation of air blowing out of your mouth when you try to inhale. Coughing is unpleasant unless you're sure to breathe in through your nose first.

There's an app/website where I can look at a summary of the data the machine uploads via its modem. Probably the most practical thing it does is show how badly the mask is leaking. While there are vent holes in the mask, in order to work it relies on there being a fairly good seal around the nostrils, and for the first week or so I didn't entirely have the fit worked out and could see big leaks in the numbers there. Eventually I got the hang of it.

It also shows the frequency of apnea events you're having through the night; these numbers are all over the place for me, and I don't really see a consistent trend, but presumably the machine is helping me start breathing again when I do have an event. There's a silly overall "score" it gives you, which mostly depends on whether you actually used the machine all night, but this other stuff figures into it too.

Probably the biggest issue is that my nose often gets progressively more congested over the course of the night, just from lying down, and if it's really bad the CPAP only incompletely powers past that. I may have had a mild cold when I started, which didn't help. I think I'm actually not a mouth-breather most nights (that would show up as a mask leak in the uploaded data), but I was wondering for a while if I needed to switch to a nose-and-mouth mask. Eventually I figured out that the temperature and humidity settings can help with this. But it's tricky. Some humidity helps clear out my nose; too much gives me this unpleasant situation I can only describe as "swampy nose", in which I get a powerful sensation that my nose is running like a hydrant and is going to fill the mask up with snot. When I take the mask off, this turns out to be an illusion. (I sometimes tell myself that even if it did, it wouldn't block the airflow, because of the redundant side hoses.) I suspect that with time I'll learn to discount it, but keeping the humidity right in the sweet spot helps.

A couple of nights I experimented with using Breathe Right strips to improve airflow inside my nose. I'd used those before getting a CPAP, and it actually is possible to use them with this mask, but they tend to degrade the fit, so it's a last resort.

As stated, it sometimes makes my nose kind of sore. Keeping the mask clean and using a lot of lotion there seems to help. It also takes a little fiddling to deal with my mustache, but I suspect it would actually be harder on my upper lip if I didn't have a mustache. I may end up experimenting with different kinds of masks, though I'll probably give this one some more time first.

Canobie Lake Park opens for pre-season weekends in a few weeks. The thing they're touting for Memorial Day and after is a major (for Canobie) expansion of their little waterpark area, Castaway Island. This previously consisted of a water play structure similar to the ones you may have seen at other places like Hersheypark, with several waterslides of varying sizes, squirting and spraying toys all over, stairs going up the interior, and a big bucket on top that tips and dumps water all over everybody. The area is always crammed with people when it's open.

Looks like they're basically putting in a second area adjacent to the current one, in the empty space where they used to put a haunted maze during Screemfest, with an interesting sort of wave-pool/Lazy River hybrid--the little loop is rather short as these things go, but it's got waves, and a sort of sloping wave-pool area going in at one end, and three new waterslides in the middle. Looks nice.

But one thing I notice being conspicuously absent on their map, and on the current park map, is the little railroad whose tracks used to wind through this area. Is it just gone? Maybe. All references to it seem to have been scrubbed from the website. Or maybe it's just closed while they re-route the tracks. But that bottom construction photo on the page seems to show the tracks just gone from their right-of-way to the immediate right of the blue Corkscrew coaster, if I'm reading it correctly.

Still, doubling the waterpark offerings seems like a good move. The demand is certainly there.

The website does claim that the Xtreme Frisbee is going to be running again, for those of you who are into that. I think it was shut down all last season.

I finally got around to reading The Dark Forest, the second volume of Chinese SF writer Liu Cixin's blockbuster Three-Body trilogy, of which I read the first volume, The Three-Body Problem, a couple of years ago. I thought this installment (translated by Joel Martinsen) was a more elegant and absorbing read than the first, though I still have my quibbles; it makes me more enthusiastic about getting the third volume than the first one had about this one.

There are spoilers for the first volume in what follows; I'll try to avoid revealing too many plot surprises about the second. Spoilers will be allowed in the comments, so don't read them if you don't want that.
( Read more... )

- We took a recent week-long vacation that was mostly in Maine. I wanted to go to Funtown Splashtown USA in Saco at some point and check out Excalibur, their large CCI wooden coaster. But the day we'd planned to do it was cool and overcast, and the Splashtown aspect that would have been the main attraction for Sam and the kid was a non-starter. Someday.

- We did make it to Water Country USA in Portsmouth, NH on the first day. Sam likes big water slides, I can take them or leave them, and our daughter definitely doesn't (she doesn't like the idea of splashing into a pool and maybe getting submerged at the end). So I ended up riding their lazy river a whole lot with her while Sam went on the slides. It's a good lazy river. It took us a little while to figure out that there are two sizes of tubes, and the bigger ones have a hole big enough that a kid will keep falling through it. They've got a nice wave pool too. We did all go on Wild Canyon, their family raft slide--unfortunately it was a bit too much for the kid; she likes the sort of theme-park rapids-raft ride where you're belted in, but going down on a glorified big inner tube while gripping the handles was apparently scarier. I liked it, though.

- We got back to Canobie Lake Park last weekend, and I took a ride on Untamed, one of my favorite coasters and one I hadn't gotten around to riding in a while. Also saw a nice acrobatics performance by what I suspect was the junior farm team of the New Shanghai Circus, with lots of jumping through hoops and hat juggling. During costume changes they filled in with "Asian"-themed dance routines by some of Canobie Lake's regular dancers, a couple of which were kind of cringeworthy, verging on yellowface. But it was nice actually seeing a show in the old dancehall, which used to be a major music venue during the big-band-swing era.

- I just heard that Lake Compounce recently permanently shut down their amazing up-the-mountain sky ride, no reason given. Many people suspect it was in response to an incident at Six Flags Great Escape in New York state, in which a teenage girl fell out of one of these ski-lift-style rides with non-locking lap bars (there were people on the ground who caught her, but at Compounce that would not have been possible). It's understandable--the ride freaks me out a little, especially when I'm riding with a kid. But it's also a pity, since that ride was one of the two things that really made Lake Compounce unique (along with Boulder Dash, their world-class mountainside roller coaster).

- There was a horrific fatal accident at the Ohio State Fair, in which a spinning-pendulum flat ride just seems to have come apart, flinging several riders through the air and killing one. The ride had passed a bunch of inspections and it may have just been metal fatigue. It's the kind of ride I don't go on--it'd probably make me sick under the best circumstances--but I imagine there's going to be a lot of attention paid to amusement-ride safety in the days to come. This is actually a pet cause of my Senator Ed Markey, and he gets ridiculed sometimes for grandstanding about it, but I think he's actually right--the lack of uniform standards here can be a problem. In this case, it's not yet clear what could have prevented the accident. X-raying for signs of fatigue, maybe.

Seven and a half years ago I attempted to reverse-engineer some filched pairs of 3D glasses. I successfully figured out that they were using circular polarization to separate the left- and right-eye images. What I couldn't figure out was why the backs of the lenses seemed to have a linear polarizer on them.

I just belatedly learned why: the way you filter circularly polarized light is to use a quarter-wave plate with a linear polarizer behind it. The quarter-wave plate is made of birefringent material in which the speed of light is different for linear polarizations along perpendicular axes. If it's the right thickness, it will alter the relative phase of the perpendicular components such that right and left circularly polarized light turn into different linear polarizations. Then you filter out the component you don't want with a linear polarizer. It works in the other direction too, to make circularly polarized light, which is how I could figure out much of what was going on by looking through the glasses in a mirror.

I'd vaguely imagined a layered construction with a circular polarizer in front of a linear polarizer, but in fact the linear polarizer is itself a vital component of the filter for circularly polarized light. The "fast" and "slow" axes of the quarter-wave plate (which, alone, would leave the linear polarization of light unchanged) are at 45 degrees to the linear polarizer, so there's no way to send linearly polarized light in through the front so it all gets filtered out. But you can do that by sending it through the back, just as I saw in my experiments.

It's interesting that this can be made to work well for all the colors of visible light--the base wavelength over the visible spectrum varies by about a factor of two. I guess the wavelength itself doesn't matter as much as the difference in the speed of light (or index of refraction) between the linear polarizations--all that's needed is for that to be relatively stable over the desired range.

I'm only now realizing just how many attractions of note we managed to hit on our trip.

( Soarin' Around the World )


( The Seas with Nemo and Friends )


( The Great Movie Ride )


What else? Our hotel was OK--Coronado Springs, a moderate-tier resort located somewhere between Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios. My daughter picked it because of the elaborately themed "Lost City of Cibola" pool with its fake Mesoamerican pyramid and long, twisty Jaguar Slide (it's quite a hike from most of the guest rooms, but there are three smaller, closer pools as well, keyed more to adult guests). The pool was pretty great; the grounds were lovely; the room was clean and of an OK size, but seemed like it hadn't been renovated in a long time. Paying for a "water view" doesn't get you much--there's a little window looking across the exterior walkway toward the resort's central lagoon. Restaurants on site ranged from a not-very-good budget cafeteria to a really quite good sit-down Mexican place and breakfast room. There are places at the hotel from which you can see most of Hollywood Studios' fireworks show, and, at a greater distance, Epcot's.

All in all, it wasn't a huge step up from the Pop Century budget resort where we stayed last time, except for the fancier pool and the presence of good restaurants on site. It was all right, but Universal's middle-tier Loews Royal Pacific is way better.

Other good food at Disney World: The Boma buffet at Animal Kingdom Lodge is still incredible; Spice Road Table at the Epcot Morocco pavilion is pretty great (I've heard the other restaurants in that area are too--it's also the best-looking World Showcase pavilion at Epcot, probably because of the involvement of Moroccan artisans who gave it a real sense of place). The Portobello Italian restaurant at the Disney Springs shopping area is pretty good.


On the Wednesday, the middle day of our trip, we took a day off from the parks and spent it at the hotel pool and at Disney Springs, finishing with the Cirque du Soleil La Nouba show there, which we greatly enjoyed. The show is apparently shutting down at the end of the year--whether they'll be replacing it with another Cirque du Soleil show or with something else entirely, I have no idea. Disney Springs has gone by many names; it was originally Lake Buena Vista Shopping Village, and was recently called Downtown Disney. Now it's been vastly expanded and has a fake history and an equally fake "springs" area by its open-air shopping mall, which is very pretty. My feet were really hurting by then, but by Thursday morning it felt like I'd gotten a second wind and was willing to march through the parks again.

All in all, good trip. The hugeness of Walt Disney World can make it overwhelming; this was the first time that Sam and I did most of the planning, and I think we pulled it off pretty well. I think it will be a few years before we go back. Maybe after Star Wars Land opens.

 Disney's Hollywood Studios is about half a theme park right now, because the whole back section of the park (formerly home to the "backlot tour", among other things) is shut down for construction of both Star Wars Land and Toy Story Land. What's left feels cramped and crowded, though the theming is still nice.

Anyway, pending Star Wars Land, which I think doesn't open until around 2019, they're determined to squeeze as much value as they can out of Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm, and make the remainder of Hollywood Studios as Star Warsy as is humanly possible. There's a walk-through attraction with a few exhibits and character meet-and-greets called "Star Wars Launch Bay" (we met Kylo Ren). Imperial Stormtroopers occasionally stroll through the place being threatening. There are a couple of alternating stage shows that happen in the park's central plaza every half hour or so, featuring most of the good guys and bad guys in the Star Wars movies who can be played by a person in a face-obscuring costume (which is a lot of them), and another show at the south end of the park called "Jedi Training: Trials of the Temple" in which little kids in Jedi hoods can participate in defeating spectral villains with a collective Force push. Just in case you don't understand what any of this is about, there's a movie attraction called "Star Wars: Path of the Jedi" that is apparently a ten-minute condensation of the entire Star Wars saga. I didn't watch that.

But Hollywood Studios' involvement with Star Wars actually goes all the way back to 1989, with their copy of Star Tours, a motion-simulator ride that originally opened two years earlier at Disneyland. The premise is that you're on a wild, mishap-filled ride through the Star Wars galaxy in a sort of flying tour bus. The queue is themed as a passenger spaceport, much like Space Mountain, but with more droids (in fact, a lot of the decor looks similar).

The current incarnation is actually a major upgrade dating from 2011 (actually still slightly before the Lucasfilm acquisition), with 3-D video and randomized adventures assembled out of sequences of alternative scenes. In this version, C-3PO himself is the pilot, accidentally thrust into the role at the last minute. Some newer material was added to the mix after The Force Awakens came out.

Even so, compared to, say, Universal Florida's many simulator rides or Epcot's Soarin', it still feels a little behind the times. You're sitting in the interior of the "Starspeeder 1000", looking out the front window wearing your 3-D glasses. C-3PO is an animatronic figure, standing to the left of the screen reacting to things. The theater tilts and shakes around with good and convincing motion effects, but the screen isn't anything like the overwhelming Omnimax experience of some of those other rides. On the other hand, that may make it more palatable for some people with motion-sickness issues (Google reviews imply that a lot of people do have problems, though).

This is a jokey take on the Star Wars universe; before the acquisition, Lucasfilm tied itself into knots trying to explain how the ride's storylines fit into Star Wars canon, but with the addition of the Episode VII material all pretense of that has been mercifully dropped. This ride jumps back and forth through decades of in-universe time and we really don't care. In the sequence I got, we encountered Darth Vader, Finn and Jar Jar Binks.

Three and a half years ago we went to Walt Disney World for what was, for me, the first time. Over the past week we went back, and I got to ride some of the stuff I didn't last time (and some I did), including most of the park's best-known roller coasters. This was particularly fun for me because i've been hearing about some of this stuff ever since I was a little kid.

If there was an overarching theme to the ones that were new to me, it was darkness. Disney's people really like to use low light or even total darkness to kick something up a notch. Here's somebody's nice video of maybe the most famous coaster at Disney World, 1975's Space Mountain, which is inside a weirdly stylized conical building in the Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland:



It's actually much darker in there than that low-light video implies; even the "space station" diorama you see going up the lift hill is suspended in dim murk, and the ride proper is in near-total darkness. With the lights on, you can see that it's a not-very-extreme coaster with a layout inspired by Disneyland's Matterhorn Bobsleds. There are actually two mirror-image copies of the coaster inside the conical ride building. The ride's not very fast, the drops are pretty small, and most of the thrill comes from the rather jerky turns and dips and the fact that you can't see them to ride defensively. It feels as if you are hurtling by mysterious means through a black void.

But then there's the presentation. The queue and loading station are themed like some sort of interplanetary spaceport, and the beginning and end of the ride involve passage through tunnels of pulsing blue and red light with throbbing sound effects. There are also more subdued light and sound effects inside the mountain while you're riding. There are even a few futuristic dioramas to look at while you're walking through the tunnel back to Tomorrowland after getting off the ride. The extras all make the little ride seem much more epic, kind of like the transformation of Charlie Brown's Christmas tree.

If I have a complaint, it's that the cars feel kind of cramped even for a guy my size. The current cars have three seats in single file, and if you've got long legs you kind of fold yourself in. (Apparently they used to have two seats each of which could hold two people, one sitting on the other's lap! This design probably made more sense in the context of Matterhorn Bobsleds.)

Most people seem to think the one at Disneyland, which was built slightly later (and extensively refurbished not long ago), is a better ride: it's a single, higher-capacity coaster with, apparently, more comfortable cars. I haven't ridden that one. Recently it was given a Star Wars-themed makeover that turned it into "Hyperspace Mountain"; that hasn't been done to the original in Orlando.

Well, comments have been imported from LJ--including, apparently, some comment spam that I never got around to deleting (LJ had a major problem with that). I had it set to screen anonymous comments, so you probably won't see most of the spam if it's still there.

The default settings for DW are to allow comments only from registered accounts, which is probably how I should have had things set on LiveJournal. I suspect the spam scene here is going to be less of a problem for now just because Dreamwidth is so obscure, but we'll see.