Zzzzz....

The last three weeks have been hell- I haven't gotten a good night's sleep since, oh, May. My schedule is all off-kilter. Work is... work. The exhaustion was hitting hard, and while I could normally keep up, for some reason my body was rejecting any kind of workout and going straight into sleep mode. I'm talking dozing-during-meetings sleep mode.I couldn't get enough rest. I would get up, work, come home and nap for 2 hours, eat dinner, watch TV, then go to bed. Repeat.

Sure, I'd make it to my PT class-- once a week. The other day a week, I would come up with an excuse (although, one or two of them were legit). And running? Ha. I maybe ran once a week. 

A little bit of background before the rest of this post: I have sleep apnea. I've probably had it since high school, since I was quite the snorer on debate trips (my debate partner would sleep in the bathtub on our trips because it was the only place she could sleep and not hear me snore), but I was officially diagnosed with it 5 years ago.

Obstructive sleep apnea is a condition where the airway closes during sleep, and the 'pauses' of breathing (an apnea) occur. From Wikipedia: "The muscle tone of the body ordinarily relaxes during sleep, and at the level of the throat the human airway is composed of collapsible walls of soft tissue which can obstruct breathing during sleep." When you stop breathing, your brain kicks in and tells your body to wake up. The body leaves the REM cycle, wakes up, and starts breathing again. Rinse. Repeat. This vicious cycle can occur 5-30 times *every hour.* The body never really gets a good night's sleep. And the person with the apnea doesn't realize its even happening.

Here's the fun part: the effects of sleep apnea, if undiagnosed and treated, ranges from crabbiness to death. The Mayo Clinic lists the following complications:

• high blood pressure
• increased risk of heart attack and heart failure
• daytime fatigue
• attention issues
• surgical complications involving anesthesia
• increased risk of glaucoma and other eye issues
• sleep-deprived partners (sorry sweetie!)
• morning headaches
• mood swings (again, sorry sweetie!)
• feelings of depression

This is some serious shit. 

The boy must have woken me up every night for those 3 weeks, saying I'm snoring or that the air from my CPAP machine was too loud (read: the mask came dislodged from my face). I can't fault him for that- he's a light sleeper and the slightest snore out of me and he's up for the rest of the night. The snoring, however, concerned me a little bit. I kept saying I would get the mask/my sleep data checked out, but I put it off.

Then... last week hit. I was so tired, I was leaving meetings to grab sugar-filled snacks from my office just to keep my eyes open. I was downing 3-4 cups of coffee a morning, and a 40oz Diet Coke in the afternoon and was still tired. I noticed on Thursday, I was feeling uncomfortable in my pants- I couldn't figure out why they started getting more snug. Then I threw a handful of Petite Batons in my mouth- and stopped mid-chew. OHHH. That explains the pants.  I was back to junk food, totally off the no-starch/no-sugar thing for a few weeks anyway, but the point was to limit those foods, not eat them in mass quantities when the 2 week period was over. Oops.

I called my sleep doctor.

Thankfully, the office got me in the next day for an evaluation.What the doctor said kind of surprised me- while I'm down almost 75lbs since my sleep study 5 years ago (GO ME!), the pressure levels on my CPAP data card show that my needed nightly pressure has gone up.  Usually, when you lose weight, you need less pressure to keep your airway open- makes sense. Less weight pushing down on your airway = less pressure needed to keep it open. In fact, one way to treat sleep apnea is weight loss.

Furthermore, I was waking up out of REM sleep about 7x/hour, meaning my sleep was not restful at all. I was almost completely back to my pre-CPAP problems.

So my doctor is stumped about the pressure thing, but he raised the machine's pressure and told me to try it out for a few weeks. If there was no noticed improvement, I have to come back in for a 2nd sleep study.

It's been 4 nights since the recalibration, and I can already notice a HUGE difference. While I need more sleep (6 hours/night isn't going to cut it), I have more energy than before. I went to class last night and kicked some major ass. I'm going running today at lunch, unless work foils that plan. And, the boy has high-fived me every morning for the last 4 days, saying there was no snoring. Win for all.