Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Love

By Penn Jillette

I don’t know if I slept at all from the time I was 18 to the time I was 30. I didn’t want to. I was just crazy ambitious, or maybe just crazy. For the first couple of those years, I was living on the streets and hitchhiking, and I’d sleep in a sleeping bag on a golf course or on a beach until my alarm clock of a timed lawn sprinkler or law enforcement officers woke me up. After that, Teller and I were just trying to get our show together and traveling to fairs, driving all day, setting up a show, doing a show, and then driving all night. More success meant trading some of my rare sleep for morning radio exposure. Broadway was finishing shows at midnight and then getting up at 4am to do Howard Stern a few times a week. I didn’t care about sleep, but when I did get a few hours, I slept deep and woke up refreshed. It was rare, but healthy sleep. I don’t know if it was the sleep of the just, but it was the beauteous sleep of the just-exhausted.

I got older and fatter and finally hit just plain old and fat. Both of those snuck up on me so gradually that they were hard to notice. When I did notice, I was tired all the time. Every time I sat down, I would fall asleep. I never woke up rested, never. I felt awful all the time.

Years before I lost all the weight with the help of my trusty Withings scale, my doctor suggested I might have sleep apnea. I was set up with a sleep test and, as with most tests in my life, I failed spectacularly. You know I exaggerate more than anyone in the world, so I won’t make up figures, but I was waking up as often as they ever saw. At the time, I was coughing all the time and sometimes I used cough syrup to get to sleep. It would calm the cough and knock me out. I was way unhealthy. I wasn’t getting any real sleep, I was just knocked out. I was getting no REM. No time to dream. Let me school you a little bit: There are two kinds of sleep apnea—central and obstructive. I don’t remember which one I have, and I threw away the paperwork—see, you learned a little something about me. Whichever one it was, it was no way for a cool rocking daddy in the USA to live. We all need to dream.

I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. The doc who diagnosed me said it was his favorite thing to diagnose because it’s something they can honestly fix. Most things in medicine take a long while to fix, and the fix is rarely as good as you want. But CPAP machines work overnight. Just overnight.