I can’t sleep.
On the other paw, I sleep too much.
So I finally had that sleep study and have been diagnosed with what I am affectionately going to call extremely super bad severe obstructive sleep apnea.
For those not in the know, obstructive sleep apnea is a respiratory disorder where a person’s airways repeatedly constrict whilst asleep, causing disruptions to breathing.
An hypopnea is a period of 10 or more seconds where breathing becomes at least 30% shallower than normal; and an apnea is a period of at least 10 seconds without breathing at all. Collectively, these are measured by the Apnea–Hypopnea Index (AHI), which is an average of how many apnea or hypopnea events take place within an hour during sleep.
An AHI of 5 or less is completely normal and healty. 30 or more is considered severe.
I recorded an average AHI of 97.
NINETY SEVEN.
On an average night, I will have difficulty breathing or will stop breathing entirely for 10 or more seconds every 37 seconds.
This, effectively, forced my body to keep waking itself up again to breathe, preventing me ever entering slow-wave or REM sleep and never having a restful night… basically ever.
No wonder any day I wasn’t drinking a ludicrous amount of caffeine, I was napping or experiencing microsleep.
I’ve since been loaned a CPAP machine by the NHS. CPAP, short for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine, is almost a kind of specialised respirator that I’m supposed to wear when I sleep. It detects if I’ve stopped breathing and responds by forcing air into my body to try and force the obstruction open.
So far I’ve not gotten on with it.
Wearing a mask all night is claustrophobic, sometimes enough to feel suffocating. Having a machine decide when you should be breathing and suddenly enforce it is, in itself, disruptive to trying to fall or stay asleep. My first few days trying to use it were ironically pretty devoid of restful sleep as a result.
It’s all a bit pants, really, and the severity of the diagnosis makes me think that surgical remedies might be in my near future. My medical anxiety is gonna love that.
At the very least, this is a very likely candidate as to why I’ve had such severe hypertension as well. I just need to make friends with the machine, first.
I’d really quite like to write about web development and design stuff on here again, but… oof, the many medical maladies I’ve been dealing with lately have been sapping my motivation to do much more than the bare minimum (which is to say, my job). Hopefully things will improve.