Dear Diary,
my day today starts just as shitty as yesterday's ended. The way I used to like my steak before I switched to the dark side of the force and started living vegan. Bloody.
I say living vegan consciously. Not to eat a vegan diet. For me, vegan doesn't mean militantly not eating animal products. Personally, for example, I gave up my beloved honey, which a friend brought from home. Home, that is - I'll probably get beaten for this - in the former Yugoslavia. Croatia? Bosnia or Serbia? In any case, it's somewhere down there where I don't think bees are doing so badly. And yet I'm just as happy to do without them as I am to do without jackets, shoes and furnishings made of leather and clothes made of wool. The only inconsistent exception: my Burberry Kashmir blanket. I've always wanted one of those, it was on my bucket list, so to speak. Yes, I know, whining at a high level and exceptions are nothing but lazy excuses for personal inconsistency. Boy, am I good. I almost convinced myself.
And let's be honest, this doesn't look vegan at all. Yesterday, scrubbing my teeth - which is usually more like scrubbing my gums than my teeth - was one time too much of a good thing. Now it's really gone. It bled through for two days, one night and three visits to the doctor.
The real tragedy?
Constant bleeding in the mouth is a pretty dumb thing to do when you're mask-breathing.
You can't suction me effectively with the nose-mouth mask. With the nose-mouth mask, suction is possible, but you can't sleep with it. Because as soon as the body falls into a deep sleep, the muscles relax. At some point, the lip tension collapses and the mouth can no longer withstand the counterpressure of ventilation. The breathing air takes the path of least resistance and flows out of the mouth instead of into the lungs. The machine notices this in the form of a leak and acknowledges it with a loud alarm. To this day, it is a mystery to me how anyone can not hear this alarm. Unfortunately, it still happens again and again. But that's a story for another day.
If it were "only" the shrill alarm tone, I could block it out. I have that much willpower. The problem is breathing, because at some point the oxygen saturation in the blood suddenly drops. At the latest now it starts to become unbearable. In other words, you can't sleep with a nose mask on. What does that mean? Well, then just stay awake for two days. That's what it means.
