I Chose Afternoon Naps Over My Grandson (And I Hated Myself For It)

I called it a nap until the afternoon I woke up and my grandson wasn't on the rug.

My daughter put Ben's little backpack back in her car.

Ben is my grandson, and he was six. Saturdays at our house always meant lunch, a box of wooden train tracks and an argument over whether a train could go over the sofa. My wife, Laura, and I looked after him every week while our daughter, Rachel, ran her errands. One Saturday, Rachel hadn't even taken her coat off.

“We're going to keep him with us for a while, Dad. Until you find out what's going on.”

I told her nothing was going on. I was 58, I could look after my own grandson, and my sugar test had come back normal.

She didn't argue. She looked past me, through the front window, at the end of our driveway, and I understood that she already knew.

I called it a few bad afternoons

After lunch my eyes would get heavy. I'd sit down for a minute and wake up an hour later to a TV show I didn't remember choosing. On other days I stayed awake but lost the thread of a conversation, and I had to ask Laura to tell me again. I blamed the lunch first, then a poor night's sleep. In the end I called it getting older, which was a useful answer because it meant nobody expected me to do anything about it.

It never seemed to matter, because Laura was always in the next room. Then, a week before Rachel took the backpack back, she ran to the pharmacy for twenty minutes, and I sat down on the couch while Ben laid track across the rug.

When I woke up the track was still there, but Ben wasn't. The front door stood open, and cold air was moving across the floor.

I don't remember getting off the couch. I remember the porch, and then Ben at the very end of the driveway in his socks, holding the red engine, one step from the street. A car went by just then, not fast, but fast enough that I have thought about it every night since.

“I wanted to see if it could go down the driveway like a hill,” he said. “You were sleeping, so I went by myself.”

I carried him inside and held on until he told me I was squeezing too hard. When Laura got home I said he had wandered out for a second and I'd caught him, and she looked at me for a long time without saying anything. After that she always sat where she could see both of us, and she never said a word about why.

I didn't tell Rachel. I told myself it was because nothing had happened.

My daughter had started checking on me

Ben told her himself, at the dinner table that Wednesday, the way six-year-olds tell everything. “Grandpa was sleeping and I went outside with my train.”

Rachel called me that night. “I'm not saying you can't see him,” she said quietly. “I'm saying you didn't tell me, and I'm saying this keeps happening.”

I almost told her my blood work was fine, and then I heard how little that would answer. She wasn't asking about my blood work. She was asking whether her son was safe in my house, and I didn't know.

My daughter used to call me when she needed a hand. Now she was calling to check whether I'd done something about myself. I didn't want that to be how we talked for the rest of our lives.

The next morning I made an appointment, and the earliest opening was three weeks away, which meant twenty-one more afternoons like the one on the couch.

Three weeks was too long to wait with nothing

On the day she took the backpack back, I stood on the porch while Rachel's car pulled out and knew I couldn't spend three weeks holding nothing but the word “normal.” Laura went to the pharmacy that afternoon and came home with a small sensor that sticks to the back of your arm and sends your sugar readings to your phone, which they sell without a prescription now. [1] It can't diagnose anything, and I knew that, but I wanted something to put on the table besides a result that said I was fine.

I wore it for ten days. One day it read 172 at 2:10, and at 2:20 Laura found me asleep in the chair with my phone still lit in my hand. Ten days can't tell me whether one thing causes the other, but it was the first time in months that something had shown up on a screen at the hour my body gave out.

My last A1c had been 5.4, which my doctor called normal, and I had been carrying it around like a permit. The NIH's diabetes institute says an A1c is an average of about three months and doesn't show every brief rise and fall. [2] The number I trusted had never looked at 2:10 on a Saturday afternoon.

The question Laura asked next

That night Laura looked at the line on my phone, and then she looked at me. “What does it mean when a man your age keeps falling asleep like that? I'm not asking about the sugar. I'm asking about the sleeping.”

I said it meant I was getting older, and she said, “Ben didn't walk out that door because you're getting older.”

So I searched until after midnight at the kitchen table, with the red engine sitting on the shelf where she had put it. What I found was the list of things doctors look for in a man who can't stay awake in the afternoon, and near the top was sleep apnea, where your breathing keeps stopping and starting all night and you never remember it. In one large study of adults between 30 and 70, about one man in six between the ages of 50 and 70 had moderate or severe breathing problems in his sleep. [3] Laura has told me for years that I snore, and I have told her for years that everybody does.

Then I found the part that made me put the phone down. One study followed 4,626 adults age 70 and older in France, who started out free of heart disease, for ten years and asked them about their sleep. The ones who said they were sleepy during the day were about a third more likely to have a heart event or a stroke, or to die from one, and of all the sleep complaints on the list, daytime sleepiness was the only one that held up on its own. [4]

I read that last part three times, and then I looked over at the chair where Laura had found me asleep.

Those people were older than I was, and none of it shows that sleepiness causes anything. It may be a sign of something else that doctors check for, like sleep apnea, and that was the whole point. A sign like that needs somebody to look at it, and for a year the only person who had looked at mine was a six-year-old at the end of a driveway.

What I didn't want to think about

My father napped in his recliner every afternoon for as long as I can remember, and we joked about it. He had a stroke at 66, on a Tuesday, in that chair, and the man who came home from the hospital couldn't tell me what he wanted for lunch. I'm not saying the naps caused it. I'm saying nobody ever asked why a healthy man needed them, and I had just spent a year not asking the same question about myself.

Nearly nine in ten strokes are caused by a blockage, usually a piece of plaque or a blood clot. [5] I was 58, which gave me eight years if I turned out to be my father's son, and in eight years Ben would be fourteen, old enough to remember exactly what kind of grandfather he got.

Laura said quietly, “That's your father's chair, and you sit in it at the same hour he did.” Then she asked, “Isn't a heart attack a clot too?” According to the government's heart institute, most heart attacks start when plaque in an artery breaks open and a clot forms on it, and if the clot gets big enough it blocks the blood going to the heart. [6]

The driveway could also happen again on any Saturday I was alone with him. Worse, Rachel had stopped saying “until you find out,” because she had stopped expecting me to.

I finally told her the part that hurt

A few days later, Rachel came over, and I put my phone and Laura's notes on the table. Then I told her what I should have told her the first day. I had woken up on that couch not knowing where Ben was, and I'd been so afraid of this exact conversation that I hid the thing that made it necessary. When she said they would keep Ben, I heard “we don't need you anymore,” and I had argued about a blood test because that was easier than saying so.

She sat down next to me. “We do need you, Dad. That's why we're asking. But I can't leave him here until we know.” She wasn't trying to hurt me, and that was what made it hurt.

She asked to see the screen and looked at the line for a long time. She didn't tell me it was fine, and she didn't tell me it was terrible. She said, “Take all of this to the doctor. Please.”

What Rachel did next

She didn't wait for my appointment to start. She spent that whole week at her kitchen table after Ben went to bed, reading about men my age who fall asleep in the afternoon, and she called a friend from work to ask what she would do. The next Saturday she came back with a folder.

Inside were the pages Laura and I had found, plus a few more. Her friend had told her about nattokinase, an enzyme from natto, a Japanese food made from fermented soybeans, and about a bottle of it called product that a company named brand sells for circulation. [7] In one small study, 12 healthy young men took a single dose, and a sign that the body was breaking down clots went up about 45%, though it stayed in the normal range and doesn't show any health benefit. [8] In a three-year trial of 265 adults around 65 with no known heart disease, a daily dose did no better than a dummy pill on artery thickness, artery stiffness or blood pressure. [9]

She had highlighted a line at the bottom in yellow. None of it shows that nattokinase prevents a heart attack or a stroke, or that it does anything for sleepiness. “I want you to know that going in,” Rachel said. “It's not a promise, Dad. It's the one thing my friend mentioned that anybody has studied at all, and I'd rather you try something sensible, with your doctor knowing, than sit in that chair for three more weeks.”

On the front of the folder, in red marker, she had written “Ask first.” I called the doctor's office that afternoon and told them about the driveway, and they found me a spot that Thursday. I didn't open the bottle until my doctor had looked at my medicine list, and she set up a sleep test for the following month.

Week eight

On a Saturday eight weeks later, Rachel walked in and took her coat off. I had been up since six, which hadn't happened in years, and I had made pancakes. Ben hung his backpack on the hook in our hall, and nobody said a word about it.

At 2:10 I was on the living room floor with him, building a bridge out of the wooden tracks, and I only noticed the time because I noticed that the crash hadn't come. It used to arrive right on schedule, and now I had the whole afternoon.

“Grandpa, can the engine go down the driveway like a hill?” Ben asked.

“Only if I go with you,” I said, and I did. We stood at the top together with his hand in mine, and the red engine rolled all the way to the bottom. A car went by on the street, not fast, and I was right where I should have been, and I held on as long as I wanted.

Laura was in the kitchen with a magazine, in a chair where she couldn't see either of us, and I noticed that too.

I changed more than one thing that month. I took the bottle, I told my family the truth, and I started a sleep test, and I can't say which one helped most. I only know which Saturday I'd rather have.

If you recognize any of this, take your actual symptoms back to your clinician. Write down when they happen and what other people have noticed, and ask what else could explain them. If you keep falling asleep in the afternoon, ask about sleep apnea and your blood pressure, and if you ever doze off with a child in the room, call your doctor's office and ask to be seen sooner, which is what I should have done before the driveway. You don't have to prove a diagnosis before you ask for help.

If you also want to look at the formula Rachel found, keep taking your pills and don't change them without your doctor, and ask before you add anything new, especially if you take a blood thinner or blood pressure medicine, have a bleeding problem or have surgery coming up.

The current product details are below, so you can take them to your doctor or pharmacist to check the ingredients, the amount and whether there is any reason for you to use it.

Ben's little backpack is still on the hook in our hall, and some days I stop and look at it on my way to the kitchen.

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