For better, for worse

originally published in Sunday Life, October 2005

By Alex May

Production manager Tristan Hanlon, 35, and her husband, Marc Lucke, 33, an online services manager, married in 1999. Tristan is an insomniac and Marc has just been diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnoea. The pair discuss the constant compromises they make to get a good night’s sleep.

MARC: “It was pretty full-on when I first met Tristan. We’d send these 2000 word emails to each other and when we finally got up close and physical, the sparks were there. She has this high energy presence, she’s so there – even when actually sleeps.
I’ve always had the symptoms of sleep apnoea including mild depression and never feeling rested. Apparently it usually happens to men over 40 and menopausal women. Tristan told me I stopped breathing at night so I went to the doctor and spent a night at a sleep centre wired up to machines. It turned out I do have sleep apnoea – my airways close several times a night which interrupts my deep sleep and apparently does terrible things to blood oxygen levels.
I’ve begun to trial a CPAP machine at night. It’s this machine with a mask that you have to sleep with to force air in. Tristan reckons I look like Darth Vader. I feel like Darth Vader. The bad thing about it is that you tend to swallow a lot of air, so it’s also a real fart machine.
I’m quite happy to be in the other bedroom. There isn’t enough room for Tristan, the cat and the i-Pod in one queen size bed. Oh, and don’t forget the CPAP machine. We actually need a king-sized bed to sleep in one room.”

TRISTAN: “Sleeping? That’s what other people do. Even when I was as young as four or five, I lived with the circus and I got up before the sun just so I could play on the trampolines. I’m always awake before 6am and rarely sleep before 11pm. Of course I often wake in the middle of the night as well. I never need to set an alarm clock.
I have to sleep with some kind of noise in the background. For years I had a radio under my pillow and listened to talkback. Not music. Music wakes me up.
Marc is the first man I have ever been with that has ever seen me asleep. When I first met him, I was too embarrassed to admit that I slept with a radio under my pillow so I somehow managed to go for a few years without doing it. When we moved into a place that was basically a truck lane, I had to use the radio to drown out the traffic noise. So I started the habit again.
Naturally Marc needs silence to sleep. I can’t even turn on a light to read because that wakes him up and annoys him. Thank God for i-Pods. Now I sleep with the little earbuds in and he can’t hear a thing. Oh, and we have the snore room. That’s the bedroom Marc sleeps in. It’s not like I’ve kicked him out of the bedroom – he still comes in for visits – but we at least manage to sleep better.”