To begin with I’m not looking to start a support group. I’ve just been diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. So of course I started researching it and am now officially scared to sleep. Then I got to thinking, I don’t really have many symptoms of this. I only sleep 5-6 hours a day, am very active, havn’t noticed much loss in memory or congnitive abilities, in fact just finished a new MS in Electronic commerce last year with a 3.87 GPA while working full time. I am the lead engineer in a very big project, 53 yr old, male. I never doze off or fall asleep inappropriately, and work out with weights 3 x a week, and swim regularly.
So I guess the big question is: Are there any others out there with this or other medical problems but not very typical symptoms?
I had sleep apnea, but the symtons went away after losing 50lbs. No more loud snoring, no more sleepness nights. I was lucky, some people require surgery or have to use a positive pressure pump/mask unit because they literaly almost die in thier sleep every night.
So, if you have no symptoms, how do you know you have sleep apnea? Have you had a sleep study done?
My wife has sleep apnea. She will stop breathing during the night. Her lungs expand normally, but no air is taken in. Then, after about four “breaths” she suddenly will gasp and take a big breath of air. This has led to a chronic hypertension and may even be responsible for the death of our unborn son.
The fetal demise is what led to the diagnosis. In the months afterward, we were searching for clues as to what caused it (along with eclamptic seizures). She was also tired all the time. She went for a sleep study and they discovered that she doesn’t breath well at night. Now, she uses a positive-pressure mask and sleeps well all night. She stays awake well into the evening and is even able to read a book late at night. Before, she would conk out around 8:00 each night. She would try to read and end up dozing off. It was a severe quality of life issue.
My point is, what symptoms are you having? If it isn’t impacting your life, what’s the big deal? How do you know you have it?
My husband has sleep apnea, and I too, must ask how you know you have it. My husband had not one, but two sleep studies done, and they seem to be rather expensive, according to the bill we got. Much too expensive for a doctor to send you for one if you haven’t reported any symptoms.
There have been quite a few threads about sleep apnea and its consequences, including thinksnow’s Educate Yourself thread with tons of good information and links. I’ve also posted about my experiences of what a sleep study involves.
Even though you may appear to have no symptoms now, you are putting serious stress on your cardiopulmonary system and are likely significantly adding to your risk of disease in that and other areas. I would seek treatment promptly. I had a mild case and I did.
IME, sleep apnea creeps up on you very slowly, and the symptoms come on gradually. I had severe sleep apnea for a long time, but could get through a day with just 4 hours of sleep and a few bottles of caffinated cola. I had migranes in the morning, and dismissed that as heat from a low ceiling. I didn’t even notice the drop in my cognitive abilities, but it was there. Even when I started nodding off at meetings or behind the wheel :eek: , I attributed it to not getting enough sleep, and not something more severe.
If a sleep test shows you have severe apnea, take care of it. The treatment – usually the use of a CPAP machine – is a trivial tradeoff for the benefits it gives.
I guess when I said I had Sleep Apnea, I thought that was enough. Of course I have had a sleep study, I don’t think there is another way to “know”. Why when I thought I was fine is a better question. My wife complained of my snoring, I may in fact belong in the world record for loudest snoreing ever. My family doctor reccommended the sleep study, and that’s when I found out all about it. Now I am going to be fitted with a breathing mask which just sucks, but after reading about it, I will probably wear it. Is anyone wearing one of those things and NOT getting any better sleep?
I have severe sleep apnea and I have been wearing a positive pressure mask for about seven years. No snoring; sound sleep; less chance of failing to wake up in the morning. It doesn’t suck at all.
I don’t use a sleep mask; 3 studies have shown only the mildest of OSA so a CPAP machine would be unlikely to be useful. However I would be interested in hearing stories of how people get used to wearing the mask. I’ve heard opinions ranging from “You’ll sleep so much better, you’ll learn to fall asleep nearly instantly and life will be better and flowers will sing and birds will bloom and kittens will bark and tralalala”… to “Well, I have to take a sleeping pill to fall asleep with the d*mn thing on” to “I can fall asleep OK but I always pull it off in my sleep so it doesn’t help”.
Hmm … . I’m not sure how to answer that. I just wore it every night until I got used to it. Every once in a while, I will pull it off in my sleep, but that’s very rare – maybe once or twice a year – and on those occasions, I’ll usually wake up and put it back on.
I also tried to approach it with an optimistic attitude rather than an annoyed one. (The machine is my friend!)
I suppose I also tried some breathing relaxation exercises once I put it on. I don’t know how important that was, because I got used to the machine fairly quickly.
There are several different kinds of masks you can try to achieve some level of comfort.
My biggest problem is positioning the machine. I find that it would be a lot easier if the hose came out of the top of the machine rather than out the front. That way, it would have less chance of getting tangled up in my pillows and popping out.
Just finished my second night with my new CPAP machine. No problems yet with the mask coming off in my sleep, though it has only been two nights, and no trouble getting to sleep with it on (but then I’ve never had trouble going to sleep, and even with the apnea problem I tend to sleep through almost anything – I might be gasping to catch my breath, but I never know it). I do feel considerably better the last two mornings, but it’s not a miraculous difference. The mask and headgear are more comfortable than I expected them to be, and I haven’t gotten the hose tangled up in anything yet. Biggest difference I suppose is that I haven’t yet gotten the hang of sleeping on my side with it on, which is they way I’m usually positioned to go to sleep, even if I tend to roll onto my back after falling asleep.
I freaked out when I first wore one for my sleep test. Even though I was roused from bed at midnight when I put it on, it took me 40 minutes to fall asleep again.
After that, however, it’s been effortless. Once you realize that the constantly blowing air isn’t going to kill you – you can exhale as usual while wearing the mask, and it helps to keep your mouth closed while you’re dropping off – it’s nothing. You wear it, close your eyes, and let nature take over. I now find it slightly weird if I have to sleep without my mask, even though I’m hoping to eventually get away from needing it.
I felt really great the first time I woke up after using a CPAP, but that was during the sleep test. All subsequent times, I just wake up and feel about the same as before, but without the headaches or drowsiness or other problems with apnea. Some folks just don’t get a “miracle” changeover feeling.
Yeah, I prefer to sleep on my side, but with the CPAP, I sleep on my back instead, since my mask gets a little loose when I’m on my side. On the other hand, you don’t need an airtight seal with a mask to get the benefits, so if you can put up with the wind noise, you may try sleeping on your side with a loose mask anyway.
This is merely anecdotal evidence, which is in and of itself completely worthless. As far as I know, there is no way to statistically analyze a sample containing one subject. But for what it’s worth, here goes—all of my sleep problems vanish completely within four days if I stop eating sugar. I snore so loudly that I wake up my wife—a feat which you may not consider to be overly remarkable, until you take into account the fact that she’s deaf. The vibrations through the mattress wake her up. I also have all sorts of trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. But as soon as I give up sugar, all is well. As soon as I start eating sugar again, it’s back to the old routine. I have no real explanation for this; it’s just an observation I’ve made.
In response to some of the OP’s comments - yes, you may think that Apnea isn’t affecting you much, but what other health problems are you experiencing that are entirely unrelated? I had a constant case of acid reflux as well as high blood pressure. I figured those couldn’t possibly be related to the apnea, but guess again - they were the direct result of apnea and vanished as soon as I started using the mask.
If you don’t use the mask, these symptoms will start to assert themselves eventually. Your body can only stand up to so many apnea episodes before things start to slowly go wrong. And make no mistake, apnea or an apnea-caused sympton will kill you. Heart disease has killed family members of mine going back for generations - my Doctor says the odds are that they never actually had heart disease, they just had untreated sleep apnea. Age and weight don’t matter if you’ve got genes like mine. I was diagnosed at age 30, only marginally overweight. My sleep study clocked me at 96 episodes per hour. (Can anyone beat that score? )
Prior to diagnosis, I had several incidents of waking up choking, unable to breathe, and nearly bought it a couple of times. These days, I’m afraid to sleep without the damn mask. Despite this, I didn’t have the instant positive life improvement people generally describe. It took about a year of sleeping with the mask before I noticed that I was living a much happier, more awake life. I can’t state strongly enough how important it is to wear that thing.
Thanks for your insights. Yes, I may have some of those symptoms and maybe should be associating them with apnea. I take prilosec regularly and tend to forget the reflux I used to have. My bp has climbed over the years but so has weight and I didn’t think of weight gain as a symptom, just getting older. I thank everyone for their comments, and will definitely give the mask a try and it looks like I have little choice but to get used to it.
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