"Let's see, here's what's been happening with me...I've been annoying my room- and/or bed-mates with my snoring since I started college. During the time that has elapsed, it has gotten progressively worse, along with my being more and more tired during the day no matter how much sleep I get. Of course, the first thing I tried was sleeping more, but if I go to sleep at, say, 10:30p, I wake up by 5a and can't get back to sleep. Then, by 1 or 2 in the afternoon, I'm dead tired and could fall asleep sitting up in a chair (and have). So I never go to sleep until about 2a, and usually wake up between 7 and 8 in the morning still tired, go to work tired, come home tired, etc.

I began to think that I was just lazy, so I started going to the gym, but it was hard to get motivated because all I really wanted to do was nap. Napping usually won out, particularly with the onset of winter and shorter days. When I lived in New Orleans, I went to a doctor and told him that I was tired a lot of the time and that I snored really loudly, and he said, "Go to bed earlier, and just get used to the snoring. Nothing you can do about that. I snore. Lots of people snore." So I left it at that. He's a doctor, after all, right?

Anyway, I went to an Ear, Nose & Throat doctor this past October and after talking to him for 5 minutes and him looking at my breathing passages, he said I should have a sleep study done. So I scheduled one - it took weeks to fit it in to their schedule - and went last Tuesday night. They glued about ten sensors around my head to monitor brain activity, a few to my face to monitor chin movement, a nose clip with exposed wires to measure the air intake and outtake of my nasal passages and mouth (and the passages the airflow followed), a clip on my finger to measure the oxygen level in my blood, five heart-rate electrodes to my chest, two straps around the area above and below my diaphragm to gague the start and stop of my inhale and exhale, and even sensors to my legs to measure movement during sleep. It took about an hour to get all wired up, then I went to my room and read for a while [What did I read? "Sandman: The Dream Hunters," of course. Have you read it, TOGA? Did you love it as much as I did?] before turning out the lights and trying to fall asleep while being filmed and recorded. I tossed and turned for what seemed like forever, they came in and adjusted some of the sensors at one point while I drifted in and out, and at about 3:30a, the tech came in and said I wasn't getting enough oxygen and he was going to put a mask on me to help my breathing. It took me a while to get used to it, but I finally went to sleep and they woke me up at 7:30 saying that we were finished and it was time to go. They said a doctor from the sleep center would be in touch with me later in the day to tell me what the initial findings were, and I left, went home and called work, saying that I'd be in around noon.

Around 3p, the doctor called me at work and told me that the initial results were surprising, due to the fact that most patients with comperable readings are middle-aged men who are very overweight. He said I had "significant findings" that indicated "severe" sleep apnea, meaning that I stop breathing while I'm asleep to the extent that I never reach the restorative sleep stages and it adversely affects my daytime performance. He said that "something" needed to be done to address the condition as soon as possible.

He suggested that I use an assisted nighttime breathing machine for a few weeks, then go back to my ENT doctor and discuss options. So that's where I am now. I got the machine on Monday and have used it during the last week with some success, even though I find the apparatus distracting and very uncomfortable. I can already notice an improvement in the quality of my sleep and definitely feel less tired during the day. All this time I just thought I was lazy! OK, maybe I am lazy, but my respiratory, circulatory and central nervous systems have been pissed off at me all night for over a decade, so that certainly doesn't help matters.

Options include conventional surgery (knife), laser, and radio-wave treatment, with varying degrees of relief and possible insurance compliance. I'm going back to my ENT doc in two weeks to see where we go from here."

You'll see some photos from my sleep test and hear what's happened since then (mid-December) in my next post. I promise it won't be five months from now.

Sweet dreams until then,

#20