So, it turns out I have sleep apnea, and quite bad sleep apnea at that. Every hour throughout the night I stop breathing around 47 times in hour, and 47 times an hour my brain goes ‘Hey wait a sec, you’re not breathing, I’d better wake you up a bit so you can take your next breath’ (and thank heavens my brain has the good sense to do this!). Clearly this isn’t great for ones well being, your brain gets deprived of rest and oxygen and you wake up with a stinking headache, feeling like you’ve not slept a wink.
I first suspected I had sleep apnea last Autumn after my wife and children noticed I was snorting myself awake when I snoozed on the sofa. Whilst it caused much mirth for them, I guessed it might indicate something was amiss. So along I went to the doctors and he referred me for a sleep study, the only problem being a long waiting time on the NHS (5 months no less!).
Whilst I waited, I installed a Snoring App onto my phone (SnoreLab) and recorded all my nocturnal sleeping sounds. Sure enough, throughout the night I had 20 second periods of silence followed by another 20 seconds of gasping for air.
By the start of this year, I was thoroughly exhausted which was causing me lots of stress and anxiety issues at work on top of the constant tiredness, so rather than wait until my appointment in April, I bit the financial bullet and paid for a sleep study privately. Whilst I love the NHS, it was money well spent, I was seen within 2 days and had the diagnosis. Its a funny sort of thing getting told ‘yep you are stopping breathing all the time and you will need to have a machine blow air into you whenever you sleep from now on’, as whilst on the face of things it sounds like a bad outcome, I was just relieved and pleased that at last there was some light at the end of the tiredness tunnel…
And so we reach today, when I got offered a cancellation appointment with the NHS sleep clinic and got to picked up my CPAP machine. The machine itself, a ResMed AirSense 10 appears to be a great little machine, its near silent (which for my long suffering wife will be a wonderful thing) and is an automatic model that is able to detect when you stop breathing and ramp up the air pressure to open up your airways.
So tonight I get to experience the reality of living with CPAP. My guess is it won’t be easy, but I will persevere as the benefits of good nights sleep is quite compelling.