About a year back, my dentist told me that I probably have sleep apnea, and I should talk to my doctor about it. She said she could recognize some of the symptoms during my dental cleaning, like the fact that I breathe through my mouth at night. Long story short, I mentioned it to my doctor, and after some follow-up questions, she said I should go to a “sleep study” where doctors would observe the way I sleep at night and determine whether I have sleep apnea, and if so, how severe it is.
Sleep apnea is linked to all sorts of horrible stuff like heart disease and strokes. They used to think that weight gain and stress caused it, but now they think it’s the other way around – if you have sleep apnea, it causes high blood pressure and weight gain, and can even aggravate your allergies or cause restless legs syndrome.
The treatments range from very mild cases that don’t really need treatment to more severe cases requiring sleeping with a machine to help you breathe or even surgury. To be honest, these treatments sound horrible to me, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I have a mild case, if at all.
It’s not an unreasonable thing to hope for – about the only symptoms I have are that I snore and sometimes I stop breathing at night for a few seconds. The other symptoms, like being tired during the day, or high blood pressure, I don’t have. I’ve never felt like I sleep poorly at night – but I have always tossed and turned and made a lot of noise while sleeping.
Anyways, I’m pretty nervous about this whole thing. Annie’s meeting me after work to have dinner, and then I get dropped off at the Marriott for the study. That’s one nice thing – rather than a hospital room, they just have a hotel room set up with cameras and monitoring equipment. Then I’ll be hooked up to wires all night, and in the morning hopefully I’ll find something out.
