1. Sleep Apnea History

Hello,



My name is Glen and I have sleep apnea..... "Hi Glen" That's about how my first steps down this road started.



Ever since I was a young child, I have had snoring issues. I can remember sitting in my grandma's rocking chair after church on Sundays and falling asleep only to have my older brother start messing with me because I was snoring like Homer Simpson. I think I was around 10 during those times. As I got older, my snoring got worse. I was never a heavy kid. In fact, until the summer after my 8th grade year, I was pretty tall and rail thin. I had a pretty sizable growth spurt over that summer, but I can't put my finger on a time when my snoring got worse. I think it just happened gradually over the course of about 7-8 years. I know that by the time I graduated college, my snoring was almost legendary.



I have never been an early riser but I think that was in part due to the fact that I hated going to sleep. I would stay up watching TV, reading, or anything I could to avoid going to bed. I don't know if that was some sort of clue, or if I just thought sleeping was a complete waste of time....until morning came around. Then I didn't want to get up. I can only vaguely recall a handfull of times when I woke up in the morning feeling like I was ready for the day. I don't know if any of this can be contributed to anything other than not putting my head on the pillow. I do know that I used to sweat when I slept. It wasn't all at once that I noticed this, but I would say that by the time I was out of college, my snoring caused enough exertion to my breathing that I would sweat most every night when I slept.



After college, things seemed to deteriorate fairly rapidly for me as far as sleep goes. It seemed that I was never well rested unless I took 10 hours of sleep. Even then, the effect was only temporary. My aversion to going to bed was still active, but again, I don't know if that was any real sign of anything. By the time I got married in 1999, my snoring was horrible. I know my wife had to be wondering what she had gotten herself into by marrying me.



......A little sidenote here for those who don't already know this. There are many more victims of sleep apnea than those who are diagnosed with the disease. My wife is one of them. I'm sure my friends and family were part-time victims along the way, too. My wife's sleep has been disturbed by my snoring for so long, that she has sleep issues of her own now. I know that because of my disturbed sleep, I was even crankier than usual on many occasions which caused me to treat others in ways that were unfair to them. So, for this one person with this problem, I can't count how many others may have been affected by it all....



It was probably around the time our daughter was born in the spring of 2006 that things started coming to a head. The addition of a child is a stressful event in most lives as it is. Add in two parents who can't sleep in the same room together anymore because of my snoring and things get even worse. We both finally snapped one day and luckily my mother-in-law was there to save us. My wife an I were dead on our feet, we had a house full of family and friends and I had been taking some OTC energy pills to try to keep going. I finally got to the breaking point and had an anxiety attack. Shortness of breath, tightness of chest, couldn't think straight. After our guests left, my mother-in-law sent my wife and I to bed to get what sleep we could and after a few hours, things were better. I quit taking those pep pills because some of the ingredients may cause anxiety.



So, here we were... new baby, and not much sleep and none of it in the same room together. My wife had started to tell me around this time that she thought I was stopping breathing while I slept, but I did't really want to discuss it much at the time. My health was pretty good, so I wasn't too worried. My blood pressure was good, my cholesterol was not too bad, but my weight had been creeping up over the past few years. When I started to think I may have a problem was when I started 'mini-vomiting' in my sleep. At first I attributed it to eating or drinking too close to bed time, but it slowly got worse. Finally, around February of 2007, I went in for a physical. I walked out of the doctor's office with a stack of referrals, one of which was to see an ENT about my loud snoring and deviated septum. The result of that visit was a scheduled sleep study.



During that sleep study, I was awaken after the first 3 hours of sleep to be fitted with a nasal mask. I wasn't very impressed with the sleep techs at this point. Not because they wanted to put a mask on me, but because they obviously didn't want to take the time to find one that fit well. I slept horribly from that point on. They woke me up at around 6:30 and told me I slept so much better after they put the mask on me. They looked at me rather strangely when I told them they were wrong. I met with a pulmonologist later that morning and they put me on CPAP. That's when the nightmare began.



I tried CPAP for about a month. I kept ripping it off in my sleep, waking up because air was escaping my mouth and I still kept snoring. In my case, the pressures that every sleep study had set for me have been consistently been 2-3 centimeters too low. I quickly gave up on CPAP and went back to the ENT to look at other options. This is where I made my first mistake.