First, disclaimers:
I am aware that you are not my doctor, if you are a doctor at all. I do not solicit medical advice, and any answers obtained will not be used or construed as such. I seek only information, and welcome any that may be offered. I open this thread only after performing my own research and coming up a little short of what I’m hoping to find.
OK all that being said, I want to make known that I will see a doctor about this - but as I don’t have medical insurance (nor money) I have to wait until I’ve saved up enough money to do so. So in the meantime, I seek only information.
About a year ago, I started waking up suddenly in the night - usually not too long after falling asleep (maybe in the first hour of sleep). The first thing I noticed during these events was a feeling of panic - feeling as if my heart was racing, palms were sweating - I just felt generally scared. A lot of the time, I would feel nauseated, but I’ve since chalked that feeling up to being part of the panic - once I recognized the “pattern”, and was able to tell myself that I wasn’t going to get sick, the nausea pretty much stopped. (Not that it matters, but I have an irrational fear of vomiting) At any rate, I would wake up like this frequently, and not be able to place what it was that caused it.
Eventually, as it kept happening (for a stretch of about two months, it was happening every night) I became aware of a feeling other than the panic - it felt as if I had stopped breathing. Not that I am unable to breathe, but simply that I’m not. The other accompanying sensation is that my heart has stopped - although that quite clearly hasn’t happened; that’s just the way it seems to me when I first wake up. The feeling is also occasionally accompanied by a violent “jerk”. Not of the standard leg twitch variety that I’ve always suffered and seems to be fairly common, but a very powerful, full bodied spasm that wakes me up. Half the time, I’m able to calm myself back down, and fall back asleep with little problems.
The other half of the time, it’s like last night. I woke up with the heart/breathing/panic feeling, and reminded myself that it happens all the time, to relax and go back to sleep. Every. Single. Time. that I drifted off, just as I hit that point of being fully asleep, I would suddenly wake up, feeling just as panicked as the time before. Every time. I turned the lights on, turned on some music, read a book, hoping to simply conk out, but consistently, I would wake up at that crucial point. The last time I looked at the clock, it was 4:00. When my alarm went off and woke me (apparently, I managed to finally fall asleep, but have no idea when/how) it was 6 am. So I got 2 hours of sleep at most. This had gone away for a quite a long time - last night was the first night that it happened in several months, and was the worst one ever.
So in the research that I’ve done online, I guess the odds are good that it could be Apnea, and based on what I know of my situation, and what I’ve read online, it sounds like the less common “central sleep apnea”, but I can’t seem to find anything tying the apnea (feeling like I stopped breathing) with the panic and the “stopped” heart together. I’m hoping maybe someone has some info that I can look into, or use to be better prepared when I go to a doctor with this.
Any info is definitely appreciated.