I have sleep apnea. In a world of cancers and cataracts, sleep apnea seems to me like a trivial topic for a diary, but some fellow Kossacks saw it differently and encouraged me to write this. For those of you who don't have sleep apnea I hope this provides some enlightenment--and maybe a little patience with your snoring partner. For those who do have it, please feel free to add your own stories. For those who have symptoms but haven't been diagnosed or treated, I can assure you the condition is not a huge deal if managed properly. However, left untreated it is potentially deadly.
There are two kinds of sleep apnea: obstructive sleep apnea and central sleep apnea. I have obstructive sleep apnea. There are several contributing factors, including the tendency for the tissue forming my airway to relax when I sleep, and the "distinguished" schnozz I inherited from my ancestors (er, thanks, Dad). Weight influences my sleep apnea, which is a perverse sort of encouragement for me to exercise. Get flabby, lose sleep. Wonderful.
For me the condition has two immediate consequences:
1. I do some major-league snoring
2. Chronic fatigue and daytime sleepiness
Sleep apnea brings a smorgasbord of other symptoms; I've had the following: restless sleep, gasping, morning headaches, trouble concentrating, insomnia, general bitchiness, depression, high blood pressure, and night sweats. Other symptoms include weight gain (sleepless nights beget raids on the refrigerator). The consequences of untreated sleep apnea inclue obesity, diabetes, stroke, and heart attack. And I thought the snoring was bad.
Snoring was my most obvious symptom. I could actually hear myself snore, which meant I wasn't really asleep. The night sweats were pretty awful. I've spent many nights sleeping on a beach towel after waking up soaked from hair to feet. They also gave me a year of worrying about tuberculosis. I lived and traveled throughout the western Pacific for several years, and spent a lot of time in places where TB was endemic, and this is when the night sweats started. I went through a couple courses of antibiotics before the doctors concluded that it wasn't TB. This issue would fade away, and then come back.
However, the thing that finally drove me to get diagnosed was drowsy driving. The situation had gotten bad enough that I was having serious bouts of daytime sleepiness that I masked by being a workaholic. As long as I kept moving I stayed awake, but the drive home was life-threatening. The day finally came when I couldn't fight off the drowsiness and I fell asleep at the wheel. The jolt of me leaving the paved road woke me back up, just in time to keep the car out of the ditch and steer it away from an Arkansas white oak tree.
That got me into the doctor's office where I was referred for a sleep study. A sleep study is a diagnostic session in which one is connected to an array of sensors that monitor brain activity, breathing, limb movements, etc. The purpose is to determine how deeply you sleep and what (if anything) might be interfering with it.
I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome (a silly-sounding condition that also robs its sufferers of sleep). I believe there were a total of two sleep studies: one for the diagnosis and the second to fit and calibrate the Constant Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machine, but by this point I was a walking zombie so my memory is a little fuzzy on the details. What matters here is the outcome: The CPAP machine worked. Treatment allowed me the first full night's sleep I'd had in something like 10 years.
I've been asked if living with sleep apnea is difficult. Define "difficult". The CPAP machine is audible, I have to periodically swap masks and filters, and if I use the machine's humidifier while sleeping in a cold room vapor condenses onto the hose walls and then dribbles into my nose. That's pretty irritating. Using the thing when I have a cold is a non-starter, and sometimes I just plain hate the thing and sleep without it. But when I use the machine I don't snore--ever. The other symptoms go away as well. I can think at work and driving in the afternoons doesn't scare the hell out of me. The machine isn't a cure-all, but I'm pretty happy with the outcome.
The machine isn't the whole treatment, either. I watch my weight, and it helps to run a hepa or similar air filter in the house to minimize allergy symptoms. I should take my restless leg medication but that issue isn't enough of a pain in my ass to make me stick with a medication regimen.
Reliance on the machine has had one unfortunate outcome: my cat has figured out how to leverage control of the machine into midnight cat food. If I don't wake to the more usual "butt-in-face" antics of a hungry cat, he'll simply walk over to the machine and start hitting buttons until I wake up. I'm still plotting my revenge.