I had my first sleep study done last night for suspected sleep apnea. I voluntarily asked a sleep doctor for one because I felt my airway closing at night in my upper throat and I'd keep waking up exhausted every day. When I was at home with my pillow that is softer and not as tall, I would wake up feeling that my airway/soft palate closed at various times throughout the night. They had no other pillows and I actually tried a stack of a couple of towels instead of the pillow, because it was too big. That didn't work. Sometimes at home immediately after waking up, it felt like I could even recreate that feeling and do it again while still partially in the sleep state with my mind awake. However, at the sleep study, I felt like my brain/body just gave up breathing/"forgot to breathe" during some of those times. So I'd hear the beeps in the other room and wake up light-headed and sort of seeing quick spots in the darkness. When I got back home this morning after the study and slept at home, I felt my soft palate area closing over my airway while napping for a couple of hours. Not sure why it was different during the sleep study..or may be it really was my soft palate or tongue closing and I simply thought I just stopped breathing without anything closing over and woke up too late to notice.
They told me to relax and turned on the tv. Apparently at some point the polysom lady came in and told me to get ready and to "open the door when I was ready" and did some stuff with the blankets. I didn't remember her saying that, but then again, I was dead tired from walking 8 miles at work that day after getting 4+ hours of sleep. So it was after 10:30pm when she came in and put the sensors on me. They were waiting on me and I was waiting on them. I kept having trouble going to sleep because their pillow was enormously tall and also stiff at the same time. I felt like I fidgeted like 125 times. Then I would sleep for like a minute and sometimes I would pop awake and get this light-headed feeling and at the same time right after I would hear this "beep beep beep" in the other room, usually twice in a row. Was I hearing a CPAP machine detect something do something in the next room or was that an alarm for the study specialist watching me telling them that my breathing stopped? I went in at 8pm.
I'm not sure if it was for me or another patient there having a study done. I hear the polysom lady tell someone else, "...he keeps waking up" and I couldn't tell if that was for me or not. I'm not one to have to go to the bathroom over once or twice in a night. My appointment was 8:30pm and I was told to arrive at 8pm. Around 6:30pm, I drank a single 16.9 ounce bottle of water and that was it for the night. I went to the bathroom probably 8 times between 6:30pm and 10:30pm. Then she asked again if I needed to go before she put the sensors on me. Throughout the night, I had to go about 4 times again. I didn't understand how that happened from one 16 ounce bottle of water after hours and hours. Yet at home I don't do that. Just nervous/stress?
She came in at 6am and told me that they were ending it then. I felt like I didn't sleep most of the night. She was completely mum and never said a word. Apparently they won't tell you anything about the study or how well you slept. I felt like I was so exhausted that I couldn't even sleep. Yet when she put the sensors on, she told me about all of her ailments over the decades, how doctors didn't tell her about stuff and such. She told me to get an allergy test, too.
I am one who would prefer surgery over CPAP for life. An ENT also previously checked my s-shaped deviated septum with right-sided spurring. I always have a stopped up nose, but that doesn't seem to be causing my throat issues.
How long does it take to get results back and what is next? I thought about getting one of those consumer finger pulse oximeters that logs when your blood oxygen level drops to see how often it happens to me at home in a night. Walking 8 miles per day at work plus getting 4-5 hours per night really takes it out of me.
Every sleep clinic likely takes a varying amount of time to get study results into a report and possibly a prescription for treatment. You may have guessed but there was no doctor at the clinic while you did your study. They come in during normal business hours and go over the results of the tests and then write the prescription and provide a consolidated report. How long it takes depends on the doc and the work load. Once a week or two have gone by, insist on a copy else they will just send this stuff off to whomever referred you. Hold off on buying a pulse oxymeter until you see the study results which will show your SPO2 through the testing period. If you experienced low O2 levels, then consider getting a meter in conjunction with the prescribed therapy if that is what the doc decides. Try to get an appointment with the sleep doc and go over test results in a specific manner. If not, use the report you insisted on receiving to look up all the elements of the report and their meaning. As far as surgery, that is a matter to discuss with the sleep doc AND an ENT but many folks who have had surgeries done report they are painful and not all that effective in rectifying physical issues causing obstructive sleep apnea.
Any idea what the beeps that I heard were? Did I hear someone's CPAP or would that have been an alert for me? Three fast beeps in a row repeated twice within a few seconds each time I heard it. It was from the other room where I guess the staff were. I felt awful right after the beeps when I woke. Just was wondering if maybe someone that comes here is a sleep tech and would recognize the pattern as a machine used by techs.
So as a follow-up...this morning at home was an exceptional morning. I went to sleep a little late last night about 2am because my weekends are my free time to do things. I got up at 8am (but will take a nap later to make sure that I'm getting enough to function properly) and during those 6 hours of sleeping, I woke up a massive amount. Sometimes it seemed like within 5-10 minutes, I would wake up 5 or 6 times. I feel it in my upper throat. I want to say that it is my soft palate and/or the back of my throat. Is there a way to determine which it is? I mean, I can "feel" it...but both of them probably feel similar. I hear this rattle/flap-like noise and I can kind of recreate it immediately after I wake up and even sometimes during the day if I purposefully try to make a snore noise. It almost feels like my soft palate is too long or something is blocking the airway in the upper throat. I get a lot of phlegm stuck above that soft palate area when I get bad colds.
