More medical adventures...

[johnpalmer]

So... Friday I saw my sleep doc. My oxygen levels don't drop too far - into the low 90s/high 80s. But my REM sleep - the deep sleep a person needs most - is fragmented, and you didn't really need someone to explain *why* given that the drops in oxygen level corresponded to the fragmentation of the REM sleep on the chart. In places, you could almost shove the graphs together, and see how desperately my brain was *trying* to move me to REM, but kept getting disturbed by the whole "hello, oxygen?" complaints.

It's worst when I'm in my back (no surprises there - an old folk remedy for snoring (and, though the word wasn't necessarily known at the time, sleep apnea) is to sew a tennis ball into the back of a pajama top/night shirt/whatever, so that you shift off your back automatically. I may need to contrive something like that for travel, and such.

Anyway: long and short of it is, I had some periods of good, solid REM but not as many as I should get. And while this wouldn't explain the huge numbers of scattered symptoms I have, it does potentially explain some of them. So, I have a CPAP machine.

If you think that I went home, used the CPAP, and had some of the best, most restful sleep of my life, you really don't know my life. (Um. This is not meant as an extended whinefest - more as a commentary on perversity of the world.) I haven't noticed any problems whatsoever with my nose for the past month - two months maybe. And yet, the very day I'm coming home with a CPAP, my left nostril suddenly decided it was a bit clogged up.

Of course, it may have been mildly clogged all week, and it was only Friday that I realized it might be meaningful - I mean, who really pays attention to these things? If you have no issues with breathing, your nose is fine and unclogged, right?

You may or may not know how a CPAP works. The idea is, normal air pressure is about 16lb per square foot. With the force of gravity, with a bit of sag and squish, your air passages at night might need more than 16lb per square inch for air to pass through them. So it increases the air pressure.

Which is to say, it's blowing air into a clogged up nose - but *not* enough air to push through the blockage. (Plenty for a non-blocked nose suffering from the sag&squish, but not enough for this.)

Let me note that this air is warmed, and run through a humidifier, but it's still a mechanical device shoving air at your nose which is already annoying the heck out of you for not working well and smoothly. Plus, for the first time in my life, I'm trying to sleep with a nasal mask pulled against my face, using a web frame wrapped around my head, and my beloved, darling cats are, of course, like all cats, very curious about this new *thing* in the bedroom. They got pitched out of the room shortly after I did my first nap of the night.

Let's just say the first night did not go well.

Saturday happened. I say that, like it "happened" to someone else, and obviously it didn't. You don't get to skip Saturdays (unless there are unnatural actions involving the international dateline, which I was absolutely sure was over the international age of consent before... I mean, no comment). But it did happen. I went through it in a daze and tried to get to bed early.

The next night was not as bad. I don't remember waking up in horror at this *THING* on my *FACE* doing that *WHATEVER IT'S DOING*, on Saturday. (That's good, because Friday night, I did wake up in such horror - and I remembered thinking about operant conditioning, and the need to avoid such an event on Saturday.)

But all I can say is that I had a better night's sleep than on Friday, which is like saying that a McDonald's hamburger is better eaten between three and four hours of being handed to you through the drive-thru window, if the alternative is eating it after its having been kept for 30 minutes past it's "toss now" time, then left in the garbage for four days under a large, leaky bag from the local diaper service. (Still wrapped, with its wrapping undamaged and miraculously clean - but does that actually *matter*?)

So: I've accomplished my one absolutely essential chore for today. I've picked up some Breathe Right strips, in hopes that they'll help with the minor congestion issue. They have in the past - they are surprisingly good at what they do. (Or rather, they're *unsurprisingly* good at what they do, where the surprise is that it took so long for someone to think of *doing* that.)

And I'm really, really hoping tonight is better. Because, you know, work tomorrow. Yes, I can call in sick - especially if it's just a "not too bad" night that's not quite good enough for working. But I'm also having a bit of nervousness about how long the adjustment is going to take.

Comments

[dubhain]

CPAPs are, in some ways, a learned skill. (And of course by this I mean sleeping using a CPAP.) And it's easy for those of us who've been using them successfully for a long time to forget about the 'getting used to' fumbles and annoyances, and simply remember the improvement which resulted from better sleep.

I've known one person who was put on a BiPAP, and the change was like night breaking forth into day. She was a completely different person the next morning, and I can say that with authority because we were living together at the time.

But, of course, it isn't always so simple.

When I got my CPAP, I was so sleep-deprived that I'd started hallucinating at one point. So although it was awkward, the change was fairly dramatic. For the first two weeks, I really liked the thing although it didn't fully treat my sleep issues (No CPAP has, to date, but they've certainly improved things.)

Then, after about two weeks, I went to put the thing on, one night, started it, then grabbed my mask, hurled it across the room with as much force as I could manage, bounced it off the opposite wall, and broke the dammed thing.

I hated it, I hated the CPAP, I hated the discomfort, the awkwardness, and the way it made me feel. I hated the fact that I had to use it in the first place, and the fact that I had to adjust my sleeping position in order for it to work.

I hated that goddammed mask and the machine hooked up to it.

Fortunately, I only broke the mask. I got a new one the next day. Because, bottom line, it helped.

Flash-forward, to seventeen years later (Maybe a nice little montage, in a series of flashes.) I'm still using one. It still isn't the perfect solution. I still have to sleep in positions I don't like and change them multiple times during the night. The nasal pillows I have, now, are far better than the old Mirage full-face mask, but they have their own annoyances. My new CPAP is smaller then my old one, but not so sophisticated and I'm pissed about that, because functionality should increase in newer devices, not decrease.

But I wouldn't try to live without one, for the world. In fact, two of my biggest fears about being homeless (I live closer to the edge than most anyone who's not homeless would care to, despite the fact that most people looking in from the outside would think I live well. It's complicated.) are that I wouldn't have anyplace to plug my CPAP in, to sleep at night, and that it would doubtless get either broken or stolen if I had to carry it around constantly. That would leave me hallucinating within a couple of days, and dead or institutionalized shortly after. (No, I'm not kidding. I quite literally cannot sleep without the thing, and you don't want to be around me if there's a power cut or if it's broken.)

Also, amusingly, operant conditioning works to advantage, sometimes. I suffer from insomnia, at times. But put a mask on me and start the CPAP, and it's as good as taking a sedative. So it isn't all bad. But yeah, getting used to the mask, especially waking up with it on can be scary. I know people who dreamed they had face-huggers from the movie Alien latched-on to their faces.

And yeah, this isn't all about me, but men tend to communicate, socially, through telling stories, and I suppose I've fallen into that, here.

I empathize with you, for whatever little that may be worth. Will the CPAP be worth it for you, in the long run? I couldn't say. I'm not you. There's frequently an adjustment period where you have to adjust to the machine, and it has to be adjusted for you. I sincerely hope it helps, even if not as a panacea but as a component in a more complex network which encompasses a solution.

In short: I hear you, man. And I wish you well.

Empathy and Geek Answer Syndrome, all in one place!

[kshandra]

...and you don't want to be around me if there's a power cut or if it's broken.

I made the mistake of trying to sleep without mine one night last summer (we were at an interim hotel on the way to our final destination, and we had packed it too solidly into the back of the truck to get at it easily), so I absolutely understand.

I do have a solution for the power-loss issue, though, thanks to my Burning Man camp mates - and no, I'm not talking about a full-size generator. I just picked up one of these after borrowing a similar model at the event last year; they had something like this plugged into it, but it looks like it's possible to eliminate that additional step with this going forward.

Hope this is helpful.

[johnpalmer]

Well, and I do appreciate you sharing your story, and your experience. It helps.

I'm getting more used to using it - but I'm having a fair number of "Okay, it's 4am, I'm taking this damn thing *off*". I'm hoping a visit to the ENT on Monday (because that congestion from a week ago is constant, and feels like it could be an obstruction) might help clear up that issue.

[kshandra]

I am hoping, another week down the road, that things are getting better for you; my facehugger has been an absolute game-changer for me. (I've even found that I don't get as congested as often as I used to - not that this is any help to you NOW, but hopefully it's something encouraging to hear.)

[johnpalmer]

Well, it does say that congestion can be a side effect of munging the humidifier settings, and I know that breathing the right level of humidity is good for a stuffy nose - so I wouldn't be surprised.

But in point of fact, I'm talking to an ENT. About 15 years ago (damn but it's weird to think back that far!), I had a small polyp removed from my left nostril. My doctor took a look with the normal cone-thing they use to look in your ears and nostrils, and didn't see anything, but said if a polyp grew before, I should be scoped to make sure another one didn't grow deeper in my sinuses.

It would tickle me if we did find a polyp, and that eliminated my need for the CPAP.

[grey-lady.livejournal.com]

Although I don't have a CPAP myself, I have a number of friends with them, and I seem to recall that they generally all had the discomfort of the early period while the nose and face (and ears) are all getting used to the thing. I hope your adaptation goes as quickly as possible.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Thank you; the adaption is going kind of quickly, which is probably a good sign.

One weirdness is that my nose seems to clog up when I lie down. Or maybe my nose is always a bit congested, and when I lie down, I really notice it. Or maybe having air blowing into my nose makes me feel stubborn and I resist the air flow subconsciously... or something.

But I'm adapting.