Developments on the home front part 2 – wake up dude!
In my last update I mentioned a health issue that I’m dealing with. Don’t worry, it’s nothing life threatening or anything like that, but it is a bit life-changing. I figure that it’s worth discussing because my experience may be valuable to you.
No this is not an image of me
Image by marvin L
But first a bit of background:
I have had problems with drowsiness for years, probably for longer than I realize. There are certain situations which sometimes, but not always, lead me to start dozing off. Some of these things are relatively benign, like, saying, sitting on the couch. Others would not be so good, like when, say, sitting in a meeting of some kind. Others, like when driving, were not very good at all.
At one point several years ago I did go see a doctor about this falling asleep problem, but the experience wasn’t very helpful. My sleeping habits weren’t always very good so it could have been that I was getting myself overtired at different times. I just decided that these things happened rarely enough that they weren’t worth worrying about. In retrospect, that was a dumb idea.
Things finally came to a head when these “nodding off” experiences were starting to have a negative effect on some important aspects of my life. I finally went to a doctor, explained my symptoms, and got scheduled for some testing.
It took a few weeks, but I finally got a diagnosis. Yes, there was (is) something wrong with me. Most of you have probably figured it out by now.
I have been diagnosed with sleep apnea.
It’s not as foreboding as, say, a cancer diagnosis, but the phrase does mean something to a lot of people. There’s lots of information on the Web about sleep apnea, but I’ll try to give you a short version here. My body doesn’t get enough oxygen when I sleep because I stop breathing for seconds at a time. A common reason for this problem is that there are soft tissues inside your throat which relax during sleep and occasionally block your airway. Eventually some kind of reflex kicks in and causes you to clear your throat, allowing you to breathe again. And so you breathe fine until your airway gets blocked again. And then your body somehow manages to clear the blockage again. And so on.
Most of this activity happens when you are unconscious or “sleeping”. Unfortunately, all of this blocking and clearing activity manages to really screw up your sleep cycles. As a result, your body will try to get sleep whenever it sees fit, which is normally during inopportune times.
Here’s an interesting contrast for you. On the one hand, imagine constantly choking and recovering your air during your sleep, but you’re completely oblivious to this. You wake up tired and sometimes you feel OK, other times you feel like crap, and you chalk these experiences up to fate, bad luck, or staying up too late. By contrast, imagine yourself in a public setting feeling fairly alert and well rested and then… something changes. You start to feel drowsy but you’re not sure why. Your vision starts to blur a bit and your hearing changes. Noise becomes a detached abstraction that seems quieter and farther away than it really is. You become aware that you’re starting to lose consciousness AT A VERY BAD TIME. So you fight it. You move around: squirm, shuffle, straighten, and stretch. You feel your head quintuple in weight and it starts heading toward the nearest horizontal surface. It feels like being caught in a nightmare that you can’t get out of. Me, I fought falling asleep by trying to take notes and madly write myself back to alertness. It’s always interesting to check out the results afterwards because my normally legible scrawl eventually and inevitably degenerates into incomprehensible scrawls and squiggles. It’s entertaining and disturbing at the same time.
No this is not a picture of me but this is the kind of mask that I use
Image by ~twon~
So my new best friends are a facemask and a machine that makes sure I breathe properly at night. The machine is a CPAP (Continuous Positive Air Pressure) unit that forces air through a tube into the mask and into your lungs every couple of seconds. The goal of this treatment is to make sure that you breathe regularly while you sleep. I’ve been following this treatment for about five weeks now. The first three nights were hellish as I tried to get comfortable with the mask, which tends to (loudly) leak air if it isn’t fastened to your face with a good seal – sometimes it sounds like a bout of flatulence, to be honest.
Things have been going a lot better since then. I generally sleep through most nights and feel decent in the morning. There are some drawbacks, of course. It’s forced me to adopt a different routine at nights which, fortunately, my wife has been patient and understanding about. I have to keep the mask tightly fastened at night. Between the headgear straps and parts of the mask itself, I usually wake up with red marks and sore spots on my forehead or at the back of my skull. Thankfully this machine has a built in humidifier or else I’d have wicked dry throat in the mornings.
So is this helping? Yes, it does seem to be helping. I still get an occasional drowsiness attack, but I do seem to be recovering some lost energy and mental clarity. Using the machine is kind of a drag, but it has become a part of my daily routine. There’s still a lot that I don’t know about this condition. Fortunately, treatment has hardly posed any inconvenience to my life. Diabetics have more inconvenience to their lives than I do, by contrast. So, you know, things really aren’t that bad.
My writing and blogging have really taken a back seat during the past few weeks, in part due to trying to maintain a normal and regular bedtime. This is the longest piece I’ve written in weeks, as an example.
My motivation for writing this post is twofold. The first is just to provide a general update about myself, which is not something that I regularly do. The second reason for writing this is to use this medium to share my experiences in the hope that they might help other people. If you are having problems with drowsiness, especially when doing things like, say, driving, and you’re doing your best to maintain a regular sleep schedule, do yourself a favor and go see a doctor. Explain your symptoms as clearly and completely as possible. I’m not saying that if you have all of these symptoms that you automatically have sleep apnea. However, you owe it to yourself to get it checked out. Yes, a CPAP machine can be a pain in the butt, but it’s a pretty benign treatment compared to other problems. Don’t mess around with your sleep, get it checked out.
