Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [65]
Because you have to start somewhere.
“I’m staying in the hotel. I had an incident and I jumped out my window and I need to go to a hospital.” And I’ll never forget his reaction. He just said, “All right.” And I thought, That’s the best possible reaction I could receive at this juncture.
So I drove myself to the hospital. I didn’t see any other options. I was in the middle of nowhere. I wasn’t going to knock on people’s doors and be like, “Did you hear that guy screaming? That was me. I need a ride.” So I drove myself, like that scene in Reservoir Dogs. I was bleeding and shouting and I had to explain what happened three times: to the receptionist, the nurse, and the doctor: “I’m the Hulk . . . I’m the Hulk . . . I’m the Hulk . . . ” And one guy corrected me, “No, you’re Bruce Banner.” Point taken, nerd.
I was lying in a hospital bed with my clothes cut open and I could see glass shards coming out of my legs. It was the most pain I had ever felt. It was the physical pain of glass coming out of my legs combined with the emotional pain of There’s glass coming out of my legs . . . How did I get to a point where there’s glass coming out of my legs? It was cold. I was shivering. And I kept asking for warm blankets because I was afraid that if I moved, the glass would go deeper. I waited ten minutes and said to the nurse, “Is there a doctor? Because this is kind of an emergency. I know you guys have a lot going on, but I’d put my emergency head-to-head with anyone else’s.”
Eventually the doctor came and he took the pieces of glass out of my legs. Slowly. Very slowly. For about forty-five minutes. He pointed out glass right next to my femoral artery, and if the glass had cut it I would have bled to death. Then he said, “You should be dead.”
And I said, “No, you should!”
I zinged him.
Because I’m a comedian.
He put thirty-three stitches in my legs and then I drove myself back to the hotel. And got a new room. Because I felt like that one had a stigma. And a slight draft. A few hours later I flew back to New York.
So that’s the story. . . . But there’s one more thing.
ONE MORE THING
I went to a doctor. And she sent me to what’s called a “sleep study.” This is basically a sleepover at the hospital. One of those sleepovers where they stick electrodes all over your naked body and a strange Russian man stares at you while you try to sleep.
The sleep study was on the sixth floor of a New York City building. This was a concern. I had just jumped through a second-story window the week before, and if it had been anything above four, I would have most likely died. It seemed ironic that I could feasibly sleepwalk out the window of the sleep center. Ironic, but not all that funny. My girlfriend Jenny told the Russian sleep technician, “We have to block the window with something.”
“No problem,” he said in his thick, unsettling accent. “We’re watching him from the other room through these cameras.”
“No, you don’t understand,” she said. “By the time you see him out of bed, he’ll be out the window.”
“This has never happened before,” he said.
“We’re pretty new to it ourselves,” said Jenny.
I made it through the night, and after the doctor interpreted the results, I was diagnosed with REM behavior disorder, or RBD. It was recommended that I sleep in a sleeping bag and wear mittens—that way I couldn’t open the sleeping bag. More important, I was prescribed Klonopin, an anti-anxiety drug that has surprisingly good results with people who suffer from RBD. At the doctor’s suggestion, Jenny and I childproofed our bedroom. Whenever we traveled, Jenny insisted on placing large pieces of hotel furniture in front of the window. The cleaning people must have thought we were drug addicts or insane partiers because, in the morning, they’d walk into a Stonehenge of furniture.
It was a little lonelier when I was touring. I had to play