Sleep Apnea
So, on Friday, the sleep clinic called me to tell me I have apnea. Sleep Apnea is defined by 5 or more neurological episodes during sleep that prevent you from breathing properly (10 or more seconds between breaths) and wake you back up. Because of this, you spend less time in the deepest, most restful kind of sleep, leaving you overtired physically, and mentally unrested.
I had 15 episodes in the night they monitored me, which is defined as mild apnea. Moderate would have been 20 or more. Serious apnea can kill you.
While this whole thing started because my wife says I snore, apparently snoring doesn’t really have a lot to do with it. That is a popular misconception. It can be a symptom, but not necessarily. Plenty of snoreless people still have apnea.
I have a number of treatment options, but none are very reliable. One exciting option is to wear a Darth Vader Mask (see left) while sleeping every night for the rest of my life. Wouldn’t that be fun? At 34, I can look forward to a good 50 years of that shit, feeling like I am in a hospital with an incurable illness every night.
That is SO not going to happen.
I can also elect to get surgery, but elective surgery creeps me out, and it isn’t even a guaranteed cure. Essentially, I would be getting a nose job, but to ACTUALLY fix a deviated septum, as opposed to using it as an excuse to get a cosmetic nose job in time for prom pictures, like half the girls I went to high school with.
Another option is to try some hippie self-help breathing regimen, which might be an option if everything about the website didn’t scream “This is a scam!”
Some drugs, like the nasocort spray, may help (no guarantees), but they are steriodal, and would have to wait until after Dani gets pregnant, on the off chance that it would make us produce some kind of mutant spawn.
Or, like with my (still painful) spinal syrinx, I can just learn to suck it up. I’ve woken up tired and achey every morning I can remember, so why should I have any expectation or hope for that to change?
I hate that every time I actually feel bad enough to go to a doctor, they make me pay a fortune for testing only to find that I have some condition that has no reliable treatment. I should just go back to not going to the doctor. Life was so much simpler then.
Bah.