All Posts Tagged With: "sleep"

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that sleep has been a challenge for me. I’ve been through a sleep study and been diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. I was prescribed a CPAP, which is supposed to help alleviate the most severe symptoms of my sleep apnea.

The magic cure hasn’t been so magical — at least not yet.

My first challenge was the first nasal mask that I started out with. It worked okay except that it rubbed the bridge of my honkin’ big nose raw, to the point that wearing it would actually wake me up in the middle of the night and the discomfort of wearing it with the raw sore on my nose was too much to keep wearing it all night. So, last week I went back to the sleep clinic to get a new style of mask, a nasal pillow. Continued

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

“What?!?” you ask. “A tornado warning and you went back to sleep?”

Indeed I did. I heard the weather radio go off (for the nth hundredth time of the night) announcing a tornado warning for our area. I suppose the sheer volume of alerts over the previous five hours had desensitized me to the announcements. I heard it, quickly dismissed it and went back to sleep — until my youngest daughter came into our room and told me, with a good deal of distress, that the tornado sirens were going off.

I quickly grabbed the TV remote and switched on the TV to find live weather coverage on all three of our major local news channels. Indeed the storm was approaching our city, but I waited to see exactly where it was going before I called for any kind of evacuation of our household, which is no minor ordeal with three canines. As a seasoned Oklahoman, I have seen enough weather coverage to know what to look for on the radar and determine just how close it’ll get. We no longer head for the tornado shelter just because the sirens go off and just because our county — or even city — is under a tornado warning. We — as in I — wait until it appears that we’re in its direct path. Continued

For the handful of readers — and I mean, literally, I can count all my regulars on one hand — who regularly stop by this blog, you will notice that my blogging has lightened up again. The reason is two-fold. Continued

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

Tags: CPAP, diagnosis, results, sleep, sleep apnea, sleep clinic, sleep study

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

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

I thought I would take advantage of a very small window of opportunity to write a quick post here. It’s been another incredibly insane week with work. At my “day job,” we’re cramming to pull together a major presentation for a business meeting in Dallas tomorrow while still working on other pressing projects.

With my own business (that Karla manages and that is my official “night job”), we have several major projects in the works and one that has been consuming just about all my waking hours outside of my “day job.”

On top of that, the other company that I’m managing partner for is in the middle of a major overhaul and rebranding of our web-based business, with the targeted launch of the new site on March 31st. We are very behind and there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, a large part of which falls in my lap. Karla has been helping a ton with that project, and if it wasn’t for her, we’d been unbelievably behind. Continued

(2:46am)  There are few things more frustrating than not being able to sleep when you know you really need the sleep. Lying there awake interminably, the clock mercilessly mocking as each minute passes, I dread what the day holds after a miserable night with little rest. I finally give in, stop fighting to get to sleep and just get out of bed. I normally get up pretty early in the morning, but this is way too early.

The silver lining, though, is catching the second installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy on one of the Encore channels. Love it, love it, love it.

So, I guess it will be a caffeine-filled day as the lack of sleep catches up with me as this day wears on.