Three years ago, David Leitem of Butler just couldn't sleep. When he would finally nod off, he'd wake up many times throughout the night.

He complained about the problem to his doctor, who finally ordered a sleep study.

Leitem, then 63 years old, didn't have far to go to get studied. He spent the night at the Center for Sleep Disorders at Butler Memorial Hospital.

"They wired me up," Leitem said. "They put wires on my ankles, on my chest and stomach, and all over my head.

"There (were) a lot of wires coming out of my head. (I wondered) 'Am I gonna be able to roll over?'"

Christopher Phillips, a licensed respiratory care practitioner and polysomnographic technologist at BMH, admits there are so many wires it takes 30 to 45 minutes to wire a patient for a study.

Each wire records and monitors a different part of the body. There are wires to record pulse, limb movements, respiration, brain impulses, muscle tone and eye movement - just to name a handful.

Each of those wires creates a squiggly line on a graph, similar to a lie detector.

"I'm trained to differentiate all the squiggly lines," Phillips said. "We accrue six to seven hours of data on each patient. I read the brain waves, document (the patient's) sleep stage architecture and recognize any sleep pathology.

"As I'm scoring the sleep study, the idea is to recognize that pathology, tag it and report it to the doctor."

According to Phillips, there are more than 80 different sleep disorders.

"We're a sleep center, which is different from a sleep lab. A sleep lab does one type of test, that's it," he said of tests for sleep apnea, the most commonly diagnosed disorder.

"Sleep centers do very specific tests according to what the doctor suspects. So, I could have four patients in here tonight and do four different tests on them."

Phillips said the center can accommodate four patients per night and is often booked for weeks in advance.

The way the sleep study goes, no matter what sleep disorder is suspected, the preparation is pretty much the same for all the patients: "Almost everybody does two nights," Phillips said.

On the first day, the patients arrive with a completed packet of information from the doctor. They are then given a tour of their bedrooms, which resembles hotel rooms. "We have real beds," Phillips added. "There's nothing worse than a hospital bed."

Once the patients get settled into their nightclothes, they watch a short video about the specific sleep disorder they are being tested for. The video explains how the test will go and what outcomes are likely.

Finally, one of the staff members wires them up, finishing off by tying all the wires in a loose pigtail to keep them from getting tangled. The patients then return to their rooms to get acclimated. When they are ready to go to bed, they inform the staff and monitors are activated.

"We watch them slowly progress down into Stage 1 sleep and all that good stuff," Phillips said.

The data collected the first night is used to establish a baseline. By the second night, the sleep staff has usually been given doctor's orders to attempt treatment on the patient. The staff then monitors and adjusts the treatment throughout the second night's stay.

When Leitem did his sleep study, because of insurance issues, he only had a one-night stay. Like most people during a first night at the center, he had a hard time dozing off.

"I just laid there and laid there," he said. "I remember being afraid to go to sleep because I had all these wires on me. I didn't know if I'd be able to turn over. I was afraid (of pulling out a wire). They tell you, 'don't unplug those wires.' Then, suddenly I was asleep."

Phillips said

insurance companies have since discovered people who only get a one-night stay continue to have problems

and,

as a result, two-night stays have resumed in frequency.

Leitem later repeated his study. Recently he discovered he suffers from a mild form of sleep apnea. He currently uses a machine called an oxygen concentrator at night

and finds he

is not waking up as often.

He admits to wondering whether being able to sleep is a placebo affect from using the machine. He said he doesn't really worry about it much though, because his problem is being resolved.

"I'm sleeping better now," he said.