Sleep Apnea help?
Ginzue
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Registered User regular
I was wondering in anyone here has been diagnosed with Sleep Apnea?
If so, what were/are the symptoms you have been suffering from? I recently saw a therapist for : Chronic tirdness, depersonalization, dillusions, sleeping up to 14 hours a day, personal depression and unstable mental stability and poor schoolwork and ability to keep a job (due to tiredness).
She said I may very well have Sleep Apnea (where you stop breathing in your sleep) since my past girlfriends have told me I can stop breathing for up to 20 seconds when I sleep. Is there anyone here who knows anyone or has had themselves Sleep Apnea and can you enlighten me a little on this?
If so, what were/are the symptoms you have been suffering from? I recently saw a therapist for : Chronic tirdness, depersonalization, dillusions, sleeping up to 14 hours a day, personal depression and unstable mental stability and poor schoolwork and ability to keep a job (due to tiredness).
She said I may very well have Sleep Apnea (where you stop breathing in your sleep) since my past girlfriends have told me I can stop breathing for up to 20 seconds when I sleep. Is there anyone here who knows anyone or has had themselves Sleep Apnea and can you enlighten me a little on this?
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A friend of mine sleeps better if he just sleeps in a lazy boy chair and doesn't need the machine and all that jazz.
Symptoms are pretty gray area. If you stop breathing at night, and constantly rouse yourself from deep sleep you end out with all the symptoms of insomnia minus the staying up part.
Sometimes when I'm sleeping, I'll sort of half wake up and notice that I'm not breathing. It is scary as fuck. As such, I second what dispatch.o says. Go for the sleep study if you can. My dad did this and they recommended he get a hospital bed (the kind that can recline). In fact, this is kinda motivating me to do this myself....
Hope that helps.
Yeah, that pretty much described me in 2002.
I went through a pretty severe case of sleep apnea from 2001-2004, brought on by swelling in my nostrils and throat from a severe sinus and tonsil infection. I was exhausted every day, suffered from crippling fatigue and depression, I felt disconnected from daily life, I fell asleep at random times during the day (occasionally while driving), and I could easily sleep 12-14 hours a day if I let myself and it wouldn't make me feel any better. My girlfriend said I frequently choked and gagged in my sleep.
Get a sleep study done. I paid about $500 for mine (no insurance at the time). They can do an inpatient sleep study in the sleep center or they can do what's called an ambulatory sleep study where you take the equipment home for you for a night. Do the ambulatory one, it'll be more accurate.
This is not something you can handle on your own, and it is serious. It increases your risk of diabetes and retards your cardiovascular performance. There are multiple possible causes; in my case, it was due to scarring and swelling that was surgically corrected. In other cases, it could be caused by an underlying neurological condition or it might simply be caused by obesity. The specific remedy (or remedies) depends on the cause, but this is not something you should just let slide.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Keep in mind that a CPAP may or may not be appropriate depending on the kind of sleep apnea you have; and besides that a CPAP can only be calibrated with data taken from a sleep study.
Also, some people have suggested tying a tennis ball in the back of your pajama shirt, that way when you try to roll on your back at night you'll be just uncomfortable enough that you'll sleepily roll back on your side but not so uncomfortable that you'll wake up. Supposedly it works.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
As for insurance, that $500 dollar cost without insurance is surprising to me, we charge 4k for a sleep study where cpap wasn't used and 4.5k for one where it was used, but those are with insurance costs. Regardless, the treatment is well worth the expense, since you will end up spending more down the line trying to deal with the other health problems that are aggravated by sleep apnea.
Sleep apenea is when you are in deep sleep, the tissues in your nose and throat relax and they can prevent you from breathing. This will casue those symptoms. I had similar fatigue issues, and my sleep was similar to yours. After my wife read Joe Rogans blog about his apnea, http://blog.joerogan.net/archives/215, she recognised the same symptoms with me.
So the ear, nose and throat specialist had to take a look, said I have giant tonsils and that they could come out *OR* i could get a sleep study. So I had them pulled last week. I can already tell I'm sleeping better.
TL;DR - Get checked dude. It's so worth it.
Anyone try this? http://www.nomask.com/
And does the soft palate operation (to remove it) help?
I don't need the machine as much since I lost a bunch of weight. Sleep apnea usually originates in the throat, not the nose as some people think since snoring is a symptom of it. Extra weight can lead to extra tissue in the throat, worsening symptoms. In more severe cases, they can do surgery to help. In some cases I understand there is medication that can help.
No, but I can tell you that the website misrepresents typical CPAP masks which makes me suspicious of their product..
First off, CPAP masks don't move around over the course of the night if they're properly worn.
Second, CPAP masks should not be painful (again, if properly worn).
Third, CPAP masks don't really interfere with your ability to get comfortable at night.
There are some drawbacks, though. The big one is that you are literally having air (gently or moderately firmly) forced down your nose. In my case, some nights I would wake up at 3 am and have to take it off to get back to sleep (and I've heard this is not uncommon). Secondly, I have sensitive skin, so wearing the mask every night caused me to get a rash. Third, if you have facial hair, it's harder to get a good seal. Fourth, they do make noise (kind of like a loud computer cooling fan, although some more expensive models are quieter) which may be disruptive for anybody you share a bedroom with (although it should be much less disruptive than you snoring).
Yes and no. It is most effective when done in combination with other therapies. It is not terribly effective by itself.
In my case, I had multiple surgeries done: tonsillectomy, UPPP (soft palate operation), turbinate reduction (they took out parts of the blood vessels in my nose), and septoplasty (corrected a deviated septum). I had nearly a complete recovery. I may need to go in sometime to have my turbinate reduction redone, and I do occasionally snore, but going from severe sleep apnea (30 apnea events per hour) to mild snoring is as close to a complete recovery as most people get.
As the poster above me alluded to, many obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) cases are caused or exacerbated by weight, so weight loss helps most people.
Keep in mind though that we're all talking about obstructive sleep apnea, which is not the only kind of sleep apnea. There is also central sleep apnea which is neurological in origin (either the part of the brain that controls breathing during sleep isn't working right, or the signal isn't getting from the brain to the diaphragm). I have a friend whose father has central sleep apnea due to a degenerative neurological condition. (There is also mixed sleep apnea, which is where you have a combination of the two.)
Obstructive sleep apnea is more common, especially in younger people with no other evidence of neurological disorder or brain inury, but it would be a mistake for the OP to assume that his sleep apnea is obstructive without seeing a doctor. If the problem is central or mixed rather than obstructive, a CPAP may be inappropriate.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think I might have OSA, since I can sometimes tell my tongue and soft pallet sort of 'fall back' and make a seal which stops me breathing.
Its gotten really bad the past few months, I can not even get up and walk to my uni classes sometimes. My whole body aches from seemingly not getting enough sleep, however I sleep for 14 hours at a time! This totally sounds familiar... Thanks for all the advice! I'm going to go see a doctor to get a referral to a sleep clinic on the 22ed of feb. Maybe help is on the way.
Another question though: I have a pretty bad post nasel drip. I also smoked for about a year but have recently quit (including hookah) so I no longer inhale smoke of any kind. Would smoking lightly for a year (1-4 a day) cause this problem?