GILLETTE - Mark Beil has received a family heirloom that he could do without. They call it "the Beil Nose."

For the uninitiated, the Beil Nose is defined by its complete inability to function properly. Allergies, congestion, snoring - just mark this family down for all of the above. Now that he has come of age, 28-year-old Mark is undergoing that Beil rite of passage where his wonky nose completely messes with his life.

It started with a battery of allergy medicines from his childhood onward. But now things are getting worse. Beil's wife has heard his breathing falter while he sleeps. In the mornings, he consistently wakes up tired and crabby. He's dozed off at the wheel before, further freaking out his wife.

All of these signs seem to indicate sleep apnea, a disorder that obstructs breathing during sleep. If that's the case, then the problems extend well beyond Beil's nose. His whole airway could be out of whack.

To find out more about his condition, he has checked into Campbell County Memorial Hospital's sleep lab for an overnight observation session.

Greeting him at the entrance to the hospital's second-floor sleep department is lab worker Dessie Hoxie. As a self-described "sleep nerd," Hoxie runs on a curious passion for studying brainwaves and breathing patterns. She's also a registered polysomnographic technologist. That is to say, she has probably spent more time studying people sleep than sleeping herself over the past few years.

As she introduces her subject to the room where he'll stay the night - picture a three-star medical suite - Beil keeps his priorities straight.

"Do you have cable?" he asks as soon as he sets foot in the room, with an eye on the television.

"I do!" She sounds delighted he asked.

The first thing he has to watch, however, is a 10-minute educational film on sleep apnea. It's one of those low-rent productions that regularly torment high school health classes, the sort of thing that could pass for anesthetic in the right situation.

Scene one: a middle-aged couple in bed, the man flat on his back, mouth hanging wide open, snorting and gurgling away.

"Hopefully, I'll be comatose like that," Beil says, sitting pensively on the corner of the room's Tempur-Pedic bed.

As it progresses through doctor interviews and first-person testimonials, the film reveals the basics of obstructive sleep apnea. During sleep, the soft palette (that squishy mass that lies beyond the roof of your mouth) relaxes, receding toward the back of the throat. For some people, that drifting palette can cause a disruption of air flow, or an apnea.

For many, the solution comes in the form of a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine. Sleepers strap on a mask just before bedtime, and the machine pumps air down the throat, keeping airways open and breath flowing throughout the night. Beil's father wears one every night and swears by it. So do the patients in the video.

"It took a couple nights of sleeping without it to show me just how dependent I am on the machine," says one man.

But Beil doesn't look too thrilled at the prospect. A giant plastic cup over his nose? Having to lug a machine everywhere he goes? It's a troubling thought for a man his age.

Finally, the video ends with an appropriately hokey sign-off ("A good night's sleep doesn't have to be a dream"). All this while, Hoxie has been preparing the equipment that will soon coat Beil's body from head to toe.

The assault begins with electrodes implanted to the chest and calves, to monitor heart rate and leg movements throughout the night. Then Hoxie breaks out the tape measurer. Carefully stretching it over and around Beil's skull, she marks off another batch of electrode sites with a red felt-tip marker. One by one, she attaches 14 more electrodes all over his head, placed in key positions to measure his brainwaves.

As a subject drifts off to sleep, Hoxie can use these various head instruments to monitor how deep the patient has gone. The problem with sleep apnea sufferers, Hoxie says, is that they can never settle down enough to reach the third (or delta) stage of sleep, which is the most restorative and beneficial. They keep snorting awake when their airway closes, rustling them back toward consciousness.

All about architecture

Even if a snorer doesn't remember waking up at night, the cumulative effects can prove devastating over time.

Chronic fatigue is only the start. Sleep apnea limits the flow of oxygen to the body, and that can lead to memory issues, increased blood pressure and even heart disease if left untreated. If Beil really does suffer from apnea at night, now's the time to find out and start treating it.

"Mark's not really the typical sleep patient," Hoxie says as she sticks on the electrodes. "He's tall, he's lean, he's young. Most people associate sleep apnea as being an obese thing. But really, it comes down to the architecture of the airway."

She recounts one particular patient who completely broke the mold. He was a police officer, an avid runner (five miles a day), and totally fit. He also snored like a freight train.

Turns out he had an extremely severe case of sleep apnea. The hospital hooked him up with a CPAP machine, and probably saved him from a heart attack in doing so.

Once all of the electrodes are stuck in place, Hoxie braids all of the wires protruding from Beil's head into a ponytail, and then plugs them into a "headbox" - a glorified surge protector that will hang from Beil's neck and feed all of the sleep data to Hoxie's computer screen. If he stops breathing more than six times each hour as he sleeps, she'll wake him up during the night and start him up on a CPAP feed.

Doing this will save Beil another visit to the sleep lab, and get him started on the road to recovery.

Just before bedtime, Beil gets to test out one of the CPAP masks. It slips over his nose, basically like a snorkel, with a tube that runs along the top of his head back to the CPAP machine. By this point, he looks like a Star Wars droid in need of a good recharging.

"It doesn't feel that horrible," he assures Hoxie.

A bit later, the lights go out. Hoxie returns to her computer to monitor the flood of information that Beil's body will send her.

Eventually, she'll have to mark up this report in 30-second intervals, noting which stages of sleep Beil was in, marking moments when he stirred awake, and recording how his breathing worked. It can be a lonely job working on reports throughout the night, but Hoxie lives and breathes this stuff.

Dodging a bullet

At 5 a.m., Hoxie stirs Beil awake. He gets unhooked, bundles up against the cold, goes home, takes a shower, and then heads into work at Contractors Supply. Four days later, he gets his results. And it's a curveball.

Turns out that it's not his airway at all that's been disturbing his slumber. It's his legs. Those monitors on his calves recorded an abnormal amount of movement throughout the night, indicating that Beil suffers from periodic leg movements during sleep (also known as PLMS). Think of it as a nocturnal version of restless leg syndrome. Apparently, Beil's legs twitch uncontrollably at night, waking him up at times. He'll have to take a drug called Requip to settle them down.

Still, he dodged a bullet on this one. The Beil Nose may still be troubling him, but he won't have to worry about a full-time machine hookup just yet.

Even though all of the evidence appeared to point to sleep apnea, Beil's overnight stay at the hospital sleep suite provided a conclusive solution to his nightly mystery.

Hopefully, the visit will give him the first ingredient of a good night's sleep: peace of mind.