Darth Vader Returns

Last Thursday I found out that I had severe sleep apnea. A couple of episodes of waking because my throat was closed and continuous comments about death defying snoring led me to visit my family doctor and then take a sleep test. What I wasn’t prepared for was the severity of the results.

In the 5 hours and 38 minutes I purportedly slept, and I say purportedly because I felt like crap in the morning, the following was monitored

1. I woke up completely 44 times
2. I had 369 apnea episodes meaning that I stopped breathing 369 times or 60.1 times per hour! The norm is < 5.
3. I enter REM sleep on average every 256 minutes; most people do this every 90 – 120 minutes.
4. I spent over 80% of my time in light sleep.

No wonder I am so freaking tired ALL the time. This is not the “I went to bed late” kind of tired, it’s not even the “I’m a new breastfeeding mom” kind of tired. This is a mind numbing, I think I’ll take a nap while the traffic light is red, falling asleep during conference calls kind of tired. I can now admit that I had trouble stringing two coherent thoughts together long enough to take productive action. My work was suffering.

On Friday I was fitted for a CPAP machine. It is noisy, it is ugly beyond sin, it has killed whatever spontaneous intimacy that there may have existed (I hear rumours that there was some) but I tell ya, today as I type this I can honestly say that I feel ok. My brain doesn’t feel like it’s stuffed full of cotton balls. I am thinking clearly (which doesn’t explain why I’m typing this at work!). That alone is worth a whole lot. Today I don’t feel stupid, today I care, today I can smile…. Holy crap I can’t wait till I’m actually used to wearing the mask – I may actually clean my house!