Sleep Apnea? Night Terrors? I just want to sleep!

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.

I don’t know all that much about apnea itself, but I thought you’d appreciate a link to my description of the sleep study I had. There have been quite a few other threads on the boards about sleep apnea with a good deal of useful information.

Thanks, Billdo, sounds like you had an interesting experience - did you get any useful information from it? Obviously it didn’t turn out to be apnea :wink: I’ve always wanted to videotape myself sleeping, so that I can see what goes on in the night.

Well at least if mine does turn out to be apnea, and they hook me up to a CPAP or some similar device, I won’t have to worry about explaining it to anyone :smiley:

Oh, sorry, I realize that the punchline wasn’t in that thread. I actually have a mild case of sleep apnea, mostly manifested in hypopnias, that is periods where I breath very shalowly but don’t stop breathing, mostly when I’m lying on my back.

After diagnosing me, the doctor recommended “positional therapy,” or put more simply, don’t sleep on your back. To achieve this, he suggested a highly technical medical assistive device. He told me to take an old T-shirt, sew a pocket in the center of the back, and put a tennis ball into the pocket when I go to sleep, so that when I roll onto my back, I’ll roll off pretty darn quick.

Oddly enough, once I got past the first few nights, I felt I slept much better and was much less tired when I woke up.

By the way, I should also link you to thinksnow’s Sleep Apnea, educate yourself thread, which has really good information.

IANAD, and also would not attempt to diagnose your condition, but I’ll share mine:

I had a very similar situation in my life about 8 years ago. Sporadically, I’d wake up, gasping for breath, usually within two hours of going to sleep. Scared the livin’ hell out of me every time.

I thought it might be sleep apnea, so I went to a sleep specialist and ended up spending a night in a “sleep chamber” (as well as a ton of money, as it was not covered by insurance).

When the results came back, the doctor said (basically), “Well, we did get a lot of borderline results, but no real sleep apnea–and the best thing you could do would be to lose some weight.”

Duh! As if I didn’t know I needed to lose weight.

OK, then a year or two later, I went to my ENT doctor for a sporadic dry cough. He looked me over and didn’t see anything worth treating, but he did make a passing comment, “Looks like you’ve got some irritation in your throat. Might be acid reflux. I’m not the doctor who would treat that, but you might want to see someone about it.”

Well, to cut to the chase, I did change my lifestyle, and ended up losing a lot of weight (50 or more pounds), and one of the things I changed was to try to eat early in the evening, so that I wouldn’t have anything in my stomach when I went to bed. Didn’t have the problem anymore. Until. . .

One time on vacation with Tucker-babe, we ended up eating pretty late. Restaurant was packed, and we went back to our room and crashed. I woke up about an hour later gasping for breath. She at first started to freak, then I casually mentioned to her, “Now you see why I like to eat early.”

I later did some Google searches on “acid reflux” (or “gastric reflux”) and found out that “gasping for breath soon after going to sleep” is not an unusual symptom.

Now, I never had a doctor diagnose mine, and likewise I can’t say anything about yours, but I was satisfied that that’s what it might have been in my case–and treating it was no problem. The old joke, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” Doctor: “Then don’t do that.”

Tell, you might try combing the ads in the paper to see if any of the local medical schools/hospitals are running sleep studies where they offer to try out experimental drugs on you. (IOW, you’ll be a lab rat, but you’ll either get free treatment or paid for your participation.) In this area, at least, there’s one or more offer (though not necessarily for your problems) a month.

Even if your problems aren’t solved by this, at least you will have been examined by a medical professional who might give you an idea of what’s causing your problems. (That way you’re not running back and forth between Drs. while they try to figure out what’s wrong with you, while running up huge bills.)

Interesting… this actually could fit my situation too… One thing I’ve noticed is that I sometimes tend to cough a lot in my sleep. A friend of mine was diagnosed with acid reflux, and one of his biggest symptoms was coughing constantly when he laid down (I always attributed mine to smoking). Will definitely keep this possibility in mine.

This is a good idea; I will have to keep my eyes peeled. Never been above being a human guinea pig :smiley:

Billdo, thanks for the link to **thinksnow’s ** thread - at the very least, it’s a good reminder to me as to why I need to get this resolved one way or the other with as little delay as possible.

I was diagnosed with sleep apnea earlier this year. My problem was that I sleepwalked, that I woke up a few times during the night, and that I was excessively tired during the day.

People with sleep apnea have trouble breathing during the night. The air is inhaled, but the passageway is partially blocked. This blockage causes the person to stop breathing momentarily, and this wakes up the person, even if only for a moment. (Those with severe apnea may become unconscious or die, of course.)

One treatment method for sleep apnea is to use a CPAP machine. The CPAP is attached to a six-foot hose, at the end of which is a mask. Air is blown in from the CPAP to the mask into the nose, thus keeping the passageway clear. This is supposed to allow for a more-restful sleep, with few (if any) interruptions.

I’ve had mine for a little over a month, and I haven’t seen any improvement (aside from the sleepwalking). YMMV, of course.

Just thought of this today. I can’t vouch for the book, but Matthew “That Crazy Guy on TV” Lesko wrote a book entitled Free Health Care, which you might see if a library near you has, so you can see if there’s anything in it you could use.