But the tigers come at night,
With their voices soft as thunder,
As they tear your hope apart,
As they turn your dream to shame.
-From Les Miserables
Some consider this a metaphor for sleep apnea. It really does turn one's life upside down.
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It is true that poor sleep can lead to lots of problems. I had all kinds of apnea symptoms and never ever thought I had apnea until very recently when I came to Florida.
ReplyDeleteI spent most of my 20s, all of my 30s and 40s NAPPING at every every opportunity. It was my main hobby. ALSO I woke up a majority of mornings feeling really awful: worse than before I went to bed, sometimes.
I would often ask the doctors I saw what could possibly be wrong that I needed to nap all of the time. Every once in a while one would check me for thyroid problems.
One of them gave me kind of a lecture that I think the point of was he thought I was just lazy and that was why I slept all of the time.
Some weight gain may be what pushed the condition to the limit. Just as I would begin to "drop off" to sleep I would suddenly have the terrifying experience of feeling I was suffocating, and would have to push myself up off of the bed to regain my breath.
At last I had a symptom that a doctor saw was sleep apnea.
During my first year of sound restful sleep, I was surprised during the day that I wasn't sleepy!
AND, by the way, my husband very clearly had blocked air passageways while sleeping -- it was completely obvious to me, sleeping next to him.
ReplyDeleteHe went to a place called a sleep institute in Michigan to ask about the possibility that he had apnea. Before they would do a sleep study, they gave a morning blood test (taken after my husband awoke, showered, and drove 45 minutes to the clinic) and said they were testing the oxygen level. They didn't do sleep studies unless the oxygen level of the blood had an indication of some kind.
It made me really mad at the time, because it seemed to make little sense. My husband's blood oxygen level did not "qualify" him to have a sleep study at that time.
Since we have moved to FL, he has also had a sleep study and now uses a CPAP. We both are feeling so much better!