Raena Morgan: I'm here with Dr. Hajal in The Sleep Center and I've been here myself. And I know I was very anxious when I came in for a study. Aren't most people anxious when they come in?
Dr. Rizan Hajal: They are. It's very normal, Raena. And look at you, you survived that pretty well.
Raena Morgan: I did. I was able to sleep with all these wires attached to me.
Dr. Rizan Hajal: I know. Well, one thing's for sure. It's no needles. It's very comfortable. You can tell that the bed is very nice.
Raena Morgan: Nice, yeah.
Dr. Rizan Hajal: It's very quiet and people should have nothing to worry about. It's designed and aim of the sleep laboratory is for you to come in and spend the night and then leave the next day. So, it's designed to be comfortable and conducive to sleep. So, a lot of people have a hard time, what's going to happen to me if I don't fall asleep?
So on but they're very surprised that they come in here and sleep fine. And the wires are designed to be very, very light and thin and so you can they are around your head there are only a few wires, maybe six wires and they're very easy to detach from and go to the bathroom and come back very, very easily. And so a lot of people worry about that aspect. There's also the fact that, what's going to happen? Are they watching me? And so on.
Most of the people, the sleep specialists, the technicians who are awake at night, are looking at squiggly lines and on their computer is worried about that and to monitor the oxygen levels and the heart rates and so on and the stages of sleep that you are in so that they would know if you have sleep apnea or any other sleep disorder you may have.
Raena Morgan: So, they would be observing you to see if you stopped breathing?
Dr. Rizan Hajal: True. So, the quality of the sleep is very important. We're not so much interested to see if people fall asleep early or not. This is not something that is a reason to get into the lab. What we want to do is when you do sleep, you get your stages of sleep that you should get and as it it continuous, is it a restful sleep or is it disrupted by so many things?
Raena Morgan: People often think they're going to have to spend the night in a lab, right?
Dr. Rizan Hajal: I know. Yeah. And the fact that it's called the lab, people think that we're going to be running them with mice on a wheel or something like that. But it's not true. Think about it as a hotel room. It's not even a hospital room. It's actually a hotel room, where you can sleep a little bit better.
Raena Morgan: It is and you can watch TV.
Dr. Rizan Hajal: That's true. You can watch TV. You can call and text people if you want. We're not going to be imprisoning you, no.
Raena Morgan: And the other think that people are concerned about is they feel uneasy about being watched all night while they sleep.
Dr. Rizan Hajal: Right. I mean, the camera has to be there mainly for safety reasons. You know, if somebody falls out of bed and so on, we would want somebody to come in right away. But the camera is actually rarely ever used, unless we see any activities that are abnormal, if somebody has seizures at night or jerkiness of the legs or something like that, that we can monitor on the camera. But most of the time, the camera is not very significant.
Raena Morgan: Oh, it's not.
Dr. Rizan Hajal: No.
Raena Morgan: Okay, so, you can rest at ease.
Dr. Rizan Hajal: Yes. They should be fine.
Raena Morgan: Thank you very much.
Dr. Rizan Hajal: Okay.
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