Posted on 06/16/2017 9:47:08 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Sleep apnea is a condition in which a person’s breathing pauses during sleep. The pauses may be brief or last several minutes, according to information from the National Institutes of Health.
Fisher, 60, suffered a medical emergency on an international flight on Dec. 23. Her mother, longtime movie star Debbie Reynolds, died the following day.
...
Fisher’s brother, Todd Fisher, said he was not surprised by the results...
“I would tell you, from my perspective that there’s certainly no news that Carrie did drugs,” Todd Fisher said. He noted that his sister wrote extensively about her drug use, and that many of the drugs she took were prescribed by doctors to try to treat her mental health conditions.
Fisher long battled drug addiction and mental illness. She said she smoked pot at 13, used LSD by 21 and was diagnosed as bipolar at 24. She was treated with electroshock therapy and medication.
“I am not shocked that part of her health was affected by drugs,” Todd Fisher said.
He said his sister’s heart condition was probably worsened by her smoking habit, as well as the medications she took. “If you want to know what killed her, it’s all of it,” he said.
Todd Fisher said it was difficult to blame doctors who treated his sister because they were trying to help her.
“They were doing their best to cure a mental disorder. Can you really blame them?” Todd Fisher said. “Without her drugs, maybe she would have left long ago.”
(Excerpt) Read more at losangeles.cbslocal.com ...
Apnea is very dangerous. If you suffer from it, PLEASE get help. There are devices that can be ordered
I have Central sleep apnea from a brain injury. I was tested and I got 200 plus stop breathing events overnight. They gave me a machine.
May the CPAP be With You.
If you are afraid of death, get a machine. If not......it’s a great way to go out. Naturally in your sleep. There are a lot worse ways.
No, it is not.
Your body naturally tries to keep you alive.
You will suffer for a number of years before you die as your brain and body tries to cope with your chronic lack of rest.
No it is not. Apnea often triggers a heart attack or a stroke. The victims usually awaken long enough to know that something very bad is happening.
I have seen the aftermath of such incidents. It is not especially peaceful.
Get the CPAP machine if you need one.
Well, I believe it's the cessation of breathing itself which is the primary detriment. That is, the lack of oxygen intake. This as opposed to the sleep disturbance caused by the sudden reaction to this detriment, with the characteristic "snort".
I stand ready to be corrected.
Her smoking habbit didn’t help either.
I think I’m missing something. She was found with drugs in her system, she was a smoker, and had fatty tissue built up in her arteries. Sorry but doesn’t sound as if sleep apnea had much to do with her death.
Sleep Apnea, untreated, will cause heart damage. I lost a loved one this way.
Never dropping into REM sleep has a very bad effect on your mental and physical health.
It might even be the root cause of some mental problems.
Even in people without sleep apnea are bad tempered and foggy when they are short of sleep.
Living that way for years begins to wear you down, laying in mental pathways, that even after the sleep problem has been corrected can still cause health problems.
Sleep and dreaming is not well understood even now but we do know that it does far more than rest tired muscles.
I'll swear that my wife got Legionnaire's from a poorly maintained machine.
It was never diagnosed as such, but they only started checking for a cause for her illness 2-3 weeks after she'd started taking antibiotics.
They were never able to tell us what it was.
“Apnea is very dangerous. If you suffer from it, PLEASE get help. There are devices that can be ordered”
I agree. My apnea is caused by an unusually narrow airway. My Neurologist stated that I had the most narrow airway that he had ever seen.
When I was eight years old, my dad passed away in his sleep from a heart attack. He was 48. We strongly suspect that he had sleep apnea because he would snore loudly and abruptly stop breathing. My mother would have to nudge him to get him to breathe again.
He died in 1979, so Apnea wasn’t commonly known back then. If it had been, he may have lived longer.
If anyone suspects they have sleep apnea, please be tested.
Agree, my dad snored loudly for years until finally diagnosed with sleep apnea. Before the CPAC, his snoring/sleeping sounded so scary..he would snore, then sounded like a deep throat rattle, then a gurgle/wheezing sound until it started all over again. That was one breath!
I think my mom has it too but refuses to get checked. Hers a little different..she doesn’t snore loudly, sometimes not at all but will often wake up suddenly like she’s choking or can’t catch her breath.
CPAP!
Thanks for your explanation. For my part, I awake with sometimes extensive but always vague recollections of my dreams, often of an epic nature. Sometimes I can make some kind of sense out of these recollections. I hope this portends well for my mental and physical health :-)
I have severe OSA. I did 2 sleep studies and I stopped breathing 80 to over 90 times a hour.
I got a rental BiPAP through Medicaid that would have cost about $2500 but instead they paid almost $500 a month. I only was able to use it a little over 5 months. I had surgery and couldn’t use it because I had severe pain in my back the two times I tried.
Then I lost my coverage due to paperwork issues and I wasn’t able to return the machine for a few months. I owe about $3600.
I have issues falling asleep, staying asleep and going back to sleep on top of the OSA. If I’m lucky I get a total of 2-3 hours of sleep. I rarely get to REM sleep. I don’t feel rested, and often feel even more exhausted than before I went to bed.
Those few months I had the BiPap I always felt that I got enough sleep even if I woke due to pain.
I am fairly sure I have had it since I was a child. I have a 5 year old niece that also has sleep apnea.
Good Lord!!
I pray she made a full recovery.
I usually rip mine off in my sleep because I hate wearing it.
Then I put it back on.
They make travel CPAP machines that can be used on airliners. I don’t know how many people use them.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.