The weekend I slept 14 hours and still woke up tired
Gene, a middle-school band director, went to bed at nine on a Saturday and woke up at 11:40 on Sunday, and he still had to decide whether putting on socks was worth it. Then his wife stopped joking and told him what she'd been hearing at night.
This is a composite story. Names and personal details are invented and combined from real experiences people in this community have shared.
Personal experiences are individual and aren’t medical advice. Talk to a qualified professional about your own health.
The note on the coffee maker said: Left for 9:30 Mass. You were asleep. Back by noon. If you are still asleep when I get back I am calling someone. Love, L.
Gene Pulaski read it at 11:40 on a Sunday morning, in his undershirt, with one sock on.
He had gone to bed at 9:30 the night before. He did the math twice, standing there, because band directors are good at counting and he wanted to be wrong. Fourteen hours, a little more. And he felt like he had spent the night carrying the sousaphone up the bleachers and back down.
He sat at the kitchen table and looked at the other sock for a while, genuinely weighing whether it was worth it.
Twenty-six years of notes
Linda leaves for work before six on weekdays. She is a court reporter, and she types faster than Gene can think. For twenty-six years they have left each other notes on the coffee maker, stuck to the water tank with a strip of masking tape. Mostly logistics. Sometimes jokes. Dog ate a crayon. Blue. We'll know tomorrow. Once, on their tenth anniversary, a list of the ten worst things he had ever cooked, ranked.
Gene is fifty-three and has directed the middle-school band in their town for twenty-four years. He conducts with a pencil because he lost his baton in 2003 and decided the pencil had more authority. He knows the name of every sixth grader who has ever squeaked a clarinet in his room. On Memorial Day he plays taps at the cemetery on a trumpet older than most of the teachers in his building.
For about two years, fall had been flattening him. Marching band on Friday nights, sitting in the stands at the high school games to support his former students. Saturday competitions, a yellow school bus at 6 a.m., two hundred granola bars. Grading and music orders on the couch until midnight, with a diet soda to get through it.
He had always believed a man could fix tired by sleeping. That was the whole plan. Get to the weekend, sleep it off.
Then came the Sunday when he slept fourteen hours and it didn't work.
What Linda had been counting
She came home from church at 12:10 and found him at the table with one sock on.
Gene made a joke. He said something about hibernating, about the bears having the right idea.
Linda didn't laugh. She put her purse down and sat across from him, still in her church coat, and said, "Gene, you stop breathing."
He said he didn't understand.
"At night. You snore, and then you stop, and then you make this sound like you're coming up from underwater." She turned her keys over in her hands. "I've been counting. Some nights I lie there and count."
He asked how long.
"Since last Christmas," she said.
That was the moment his stomach dropped. Not the fourteen hours. The picture of his wife in the dark, for ten months, lying awake beside him, counting, and then getting up at 5:30 to tape a joke to the coffee maker so he wouldn't worry.
The unglamorous part
He called the doctor on Monday from the band room, on his free period, with the door shut and a trombone case propped against it.
The doctor ran bloodwork and asked a lot of questions Gene would have answered differently if Linda hadn't been sitting beside him. A few things came back worth fixing. Then the doctor sent him for a sleep study, which meant one night in a room with wires taped to his scalp and a camera in the corner. He slept terribly and was certain it would come back normal and he would have wasted everyone's time.
It did not come back normal.
The fix for that part was not glamorous, and he complained about it for about three weeks, loudly, to anyone in the teachers' lounge who would listen. Then one morning in November he woke up before the alarm and lay there confused, trying to figure out what was different, and realized it was that he felt like a person.
It wasn't one thing, and he's honest about that. He moved the diet soda to lunchtime and then dropped it. He put the grading in the band room at 3:30 instead of on the couch at 11. He walked the track behind the school after rehearsal, slowly, with the drum majors who had decided that was their hangout now. He'd been reading, too, about what other people who felt like him had looked into, and Linda's sister, who is a nurse, sent him a story about a night nurse who wrote "wrecked" in her log for a year before the day she didn't. Gene took the questions it raised to his doctor, not to the internet.
It came back sometimes. Contest season in the spring was rough, and there was a bus trip to a festival where he got four hours of sleep in a hotel with forty eighth graders and felt fifty-three going on ninety. The difference was that now he knew it was a bad week, not his new life.
Linda still counts, some nights, out of habit. She told him the numbers had gotten boring.
A Saturday in April
On a Saturday in April, Gene woke up at 6:50 with no alarm and no argument from his body.
Linda was asleep beside him, breathing evenly, on her one morning to sleep in. He put on both socks on the first try, and nobody was there to appreciate it.
Downstairs he made the coffee, tore off a strip of masking tape, and wrote on the back of a band-concert flyer.
Took the dog around the lake. Back by 8. Awake. Love, G.
He stuck it to the coffee maker, set the pencil on top, and went out into the cold with the dog pulling ahead of him on the leash.