By Brad on Apr 1, 2008 in Health & Welfare | comments(3)
As I’ve discussed here previously, I’m a pretty big guy. I’ve even been referred to being “as big as an elephant.” While that is (hopefully) an exaggeration, I can’t help but feel like that in the last week I’ve actually started looking like an elephant when I’m sleeping.
I took a picture of what I look like when I’m ready for bedtime, but it was just too embarrassing to post. The photo on the right shows what my CPAP nasal mask and headgear looks like (without me wearing it). Now imagine it on me with a long air hose coming out of it. It looks like I have an elephant’s trunk.
It looks funny — actually, it looks ridiculous — but it certainly works. The first night I wore it, which was last Wednesday night, I sleep all the way through to my alarm without waking up. Karla said I didn’t even move. I didn’t snore once. What a difference this one little machine can make. Continued
By Brad on Mar 19, 2008 in Health & Welfare | comments(3)
I got my results from the sleep study I had done this past weekend. And, to use the cliché overused by television news anchors, “the results may surprise you.” The results surprised (and frightened) me — and I already knew it was serious.
As a reference, here are a few definitions and standards by which sleep disturbances — and specifically a diagnosis of sleep apnea — are evaluated by. Wikipedia’s article on sleep apnea has the most concise and informational explanation.
Polysomnography of sleep apnea shows pauses in breathing that are followed by drops in blood oxygen and increases in blood carbon dioxide. In adults, a pause must last 10 seconds to be scored as an apnea. [...]
Hypopneas in adults are defined as a 50% reduction in air flow for more than 10 s, followed by a 4% desaturation, and/or arousal. The Apnea- Hypopnea Index (AHI) is expressed as the number of apneas and hypopneas per hour of sleep. Continued
By Brad on Mar 17, 2008 in Health & Welfare, Trivial Matters | comments(1)
Why did it take me two days to write about the aftermath of the dreaded “sleep study”? Did it take me that long to recover from the “trauma”? As much as I believed it would be the case, it is not. I simply took the weekend off from any computer access so I could visit family this weekend and also try to catch up on much-needed rest after a severely sleep deprived last couple of weeks. So, after a 48-hour delay, here’s the report from that fateful night…
As the final minutes ticked down before my appointment Friday evening, my anxiousness manifested as surliness that unfortunately bit at those around me. Compounding my unsettledness, severe weather moved through our area about the time I was getting ready to leave, which seemed an ominous sign of things to come. The reality was that it was a perfect picture of my evening: a brief tempest followed by a very calm, uneventful rest of the night — and my personal tempest ended when I walked in the door of the sleep clinic. Continued
By Brad on Mar 14, 2008 in Health & Welfare, Trivial Matters | comments(1)
Tonight’s the night. I go to the sleep clinic for my doctor-prescribed sleep study. I’m not looking forward to it at all. As I mentioned previously, I hate the thought of someone seeing me sleep — and when I say hate, I mean obsessively abhor. You can ask anyone in my family and they will tell you that no matter how tired I may be, I fight as hard as I can to stay awake if I’m anywhere but my own bed because I don’t want others to see (or worse, hear) me sleeping.
Tonight, the whole focus of my going is for someone to actively watch and monitor my sleeping. The very thought could potentially keep me awake if it wasn’t for the fact that I am so utterly exhausted. Even so, I’ve been fretting this all week and at a much more heightened state of anxiety for most of today. Even now, my stomach is churning. I wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t absolutely necessary. Continued
