Twenty-Two Years Asleep in a Truck Cab, and Then My Own Bed Felt Wrong

The last load

My last load was frozen chicken out of Grand Island, bound for a distribution yard outside Denver. What I remember is backing into the bay at the end, setting the brakes, and sitting there with my hands on the wheel for a long time while a kid in a yellow vest waited for me to climb down. He finally knocked on the door. I told him I was just finishing a phone call. There was no phone call.

Twenty-two years. Most of those nights I slept in the sleeper berth behind the seats, a mattress about the width of an ironing board, with the engine idling or the little bunk heater ticking and the hum of fifty other rigs around me at whatever truck stop I had pulled into. I could fall asleep in four minutes in any of them.

Then I came home to Kearney for good, to a house my wife Darlene had more or less run by herself for two decades, and I could not sleep at all.

The quiet was the loudest thing

People think the problem would be the noise of a house. It was the opposite. I could hear Darlene breathing, which sounds like a sweet thing to say, but after twenty-two years of mostly hearing her voice through a cell phone speaker at nine at night, the real thing beside me felt like sharing a bed with a stranger who happened to know everything about me.

I would lie there with my whole body braced, the way you brace on black ice. My mind would start running routes. I would get up at two, at three, walk around the kitchen in my socks, check the locks I had already checked. Some nights I went out to the driveway and sat in Darlene's Buick with the seat reclined, and I am not ashamed to tell you I slept better there than in a bed we paid eleven hundred dollars for.

Darlene found me there one morning in February with frost on the windshield. She did not yell. She just opened the passenger door, got in, and said, "Ray, this is not retirement. This is you parked somewhere else."

Doctor first

I went to our family doctor, Dr. Okafor, who has known me since my first DOT physical. I told him everything, the Buick included. He checked my blood pressure, asked about drinking, asked about my mood, and asked a lot of questions about how long I had been sleeping in short broken shifts. He said that after years of a body learning to sleep in a certain place under certain conditions, it is not surprising that it has trouble letting go of that, and that there was no single fix. We talked about sleep hygiene, which I had never once practised, and he gave me a referral to talk to someone about the anxiety side of things.

It was Darlene's sister, Marcy, who brought up neurofeedback. I had never heard the word. When she explained it, a little sensor on your scalp reading your brain activity while you watch something on a screen, and the screen responds when your brain settles into calmer patterns, I said it sounded like a video game for people who could not sit still. She said, "Well?"

The drive was the problem

The nearest place that did it was a good long drive away, and they wanted multiple sessions a week for weeks. I laughed when Darlene read me that. I had just retired from driving. The idea of spending my mornings on I-80 to go learn how to relax struck both of us as a joke with no punchline.

Darlene is the researcher in our house. She sat with her laptop at the kitchen table for two evenings and came back with the news that some providers do neurofeedback at home, where they send you the equipment, set up the protocol after an assessment, and a clinician follows your sessions remotely and adjusts things as you go.

The box on the kitchen table

The kit came in a box smaller than I expected. Sensors, a headset, a little paste for the contacts, and instructions that were plainer than most things I had been handed in my life. Before anything started there was an assessment and a video call with a clinician, a soft-spoken woman named Theresa who asked me more about sleep than anyone ever had. She did not promise me anything. She said some people notice changes early, some later, some not much, and that we would watch what happened and adjust. I liked her for that.

The first session felt ridiculous. Me, a two hundred and forty pound man in a recliner with wires coming off my head, watching a little movie that dimmed and brightened depending on something going on behind my eyes that I could not feel. When the screen went dim I would try to fix it, and it would get dimmer.

What changed, slowly

I want to be honest here, because I have read things online that make it sound like magic, and it was not magic. For the first couple of weeks I could not tell you that anything was different. I still woke at three. I still checked the locks.

Somewhere around the fourth week, Darlene mentioned at breakfast that I had not gone out to the car in nine days. I had not noticed. I had been waking up, but I had been going back to sleep. That was the first thing. Not sleeping through, just going back down instead of getting up and pacing.

The second thing was harder to name. I started being able to sit in the house in the afternoon without the TV on. For years I had needed noise.

Was that the neurofeedback therapy at home? Was it the talking I was doing with the counselor Dr. Okafor sent me to? Was it just time, and my body finally believing the trip was over? Doing the sessions in my own living room, in the same house I was trying to learn to live in, felt like part of the point. I was practising being calm in the exact place I could not be calm.

The bed

There was one night in April, a thunderstorm night, which out here can rattle a house good. Darlene woke up and found me asleep. Not braced. Just asleep. She told me the next morning she lay there watching me for a while. I asked her why she did not wake me. She said, "Because you finally came home."

I still have bad nights. Last week I woke at three and lay there running a route from Kearney to Cheyenne in my head, every exit, before I could stop. But I stayed in the bed.

If you are reading this because someone you love just got off the road, or out of the service, or off any long job that taught their body to sleep somewhere other than home, I am not going to tell you what to do. Talk to your doctor first, like I did. For me, trying at home neurofeedback was one piece of a bigger thing, and the bigger thing was Darlene getting into that cold Buick and refusing to let me park my life somewhere else.

We sold the Buick in June. Darlene said it was because we did not need two cars. I think it was because she did not want me getting ideas.