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NorCalSleeper

NorCalSleeper
Joined Jun 2017
NorCalSleeper
Joined Jun 2017

Hello all!

I'm Mike, 43, happily married for 17 years with three kids (ages 5, 12, and 15). Lifelong sleeping problems. Always had a stuffy nose, later learned I had a deviated septum and a doctor told me once that there was something about the way my tongue is usually positioned and makes breathing more difficult. Definitely a mouth breather. Have a rough time at the dentist because I don't breathe out of my nose well. Can't take more than a bite of food without taking a drink. Always was a snorer, until a couple of years ago when my wife said I stopped snoring. Now I find out that wasn't a good thing, because stopping of the snoring most likely coincided with the worsening of my apnea. For 15 years, I worked a swing shift and got home after midnight, so I just crashed from exhaustion and wasn't really aware of what was going on while I was sleeping.

Starting maybe three years ago, started having various health problems show up. Low thyroid. Low testosterone. Low Vitamin B-12 and Vitamin D. High Blood Pressure. High Hemoglobin and Hemocrit, which I just discovered is because of the low oxygen levels in my blood. Went to various specialists... cardiologist; neurologist; oncologist, all to explore various weird lab results that kept popping up. My list of prescriptions increased to six. But nothing was working.

About eight months ago, I started waking up in the middle of the night gasping for air. Every night, I had dreams that involved suffocation, drowning, being buried alive, etc. Pretty horrific all around. I became so afraid of going to sleep that I would prop myself up and some nights would literally slap myself when I started to doze, just to avoid dozing off. Things that used to work to help relax me.. benadryl, a couple glasses of wine, only made things worse. The breathing problems started happening in the daytime as well, so I thought maybe I'd become asthmatic.

Perhaps I never focused on the sleeping problem enough when talking to my doctor, because I had so many other health problems and we were exploring all these possibilities. But finally one appointment he asked if I'd ever had a sleep study. Lifechanging moment.

Did the overnight PulseOx first, got it on a Friday and wore it pretty much all weekend. When the results came in, the respiratory therapist actually hand delivered it to my doctor because the results were so concerning. Average oxygen saturation was in the 80%, but numerous times it dipped into the mid 60s. Then came the overnight sleep study, which confirmed what we already knew. AHI was 47, but the length of each event was particularly troubling-- most were over 30 seconds. Apparently this is why my oxygen saturation was so low. I wasn't breathing for a full 23 minutes each hour.

I'm now 10 days into using my first CPAP machine. Going OK. I've been able to tolerate the mask for an average of about 4 hours per night, which is all I'm sleeping. My AHI is down to about 5 (last night it was 6), which isn't as low as I'd like but it's a start.

Now my biggest concerns have to do with damage that's already been done. Has my heart been damaged? Will I have memory or other neurological problems as I get older? Will my hormones return to normal after a few months of CPAP? Who knows but I'm happy to be heading in a healthy direction, at long last.