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.
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.
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.
I’ve been on CPAP for a few months now.
Most nights I can sleep with the mask on. There are some that I pull it though.
Overall, I am doing a lot better with the unit. If I had any idea that I was so messed up, I would have done it way before.
I don’t get as fuzzy headed and fatigued before I went on the box.
Problem with a CPAP is that they can be very uncomfortable for some people to wear. I hated mine at first, constantly taking it off. After about two years of effort, including wearing it while watching TV, I have adapted to wearing while I sleep. Sleep almost through the night, now. Still, adapting to a CPAP can be difficult.
It is but everyone should get second and third opinions, physicians know a great deal less than they pretend to.
Long story with gruesome details redacted: After a long period of extreme multisystemic illness with many bizarre symptoms, many physicians including including neurologists, sleep specialist, and at least 3 ENTs, 10s of thousands of dollars and many tests later no one could figure out what was wrong.
One of the least significant of my complaints was that I snored like a chainsaw when I slept but I hardly ever slept because as soon as I did I began experiencing a sensation like I was choking on someones whole fingernail or a breadbag tag. This was mostly ignored other than to get me set up with a CPAP and to assure me that there was no other real treatment for my severe apnea.
The problems didnt go away. After 5 years of researching my illness on my own I managed to convince my physician that Lymes and the associated infections that come with it was one of the only possible candidates that could cause my problems and that as an outdoorsman who lived in Germany and Wisconsin that I was a very likely candidate. Tests said no but he treated me anyway. By this time my primary was quite convinced that nothing was really wrong and that I was developing mental health problems and told me as much but he decided to humor me.
(More than you wanted to know detail ahead.)
A month of doxycycline later, a number of outdoors related objects fell out of the sinus infection that I was assured I didnt have. One non-nature related item came out which was a diamond shaped plastic piece of confetti about 3/8x5/8" that I hadnt seen since about 17 years previous. How all these things got in there I will never know, nonetheless, at least half my health problems including the "untreatable other than cpap" apnea went away. My family often checks on me now because I sleep so quietly now that they think Ive died.
The other half of the problems, and a circus of quacks later, I had to find the answer to also but, thats another story.
My primary was very experienced and "the best diagnostician around" according to other physicians. He was the guy they regularly went to to find the answer. He couldnt find the answer even with a large team of help. Your physician probably isnt as good and may have even been at the bottom of the class.
I turned out to be wrong in my diagnosis but no less wrong than the army of physicians. I was wrong for much less money and it was the fact that I didnt give up that kept me off psych meds and eventually stumbled on to the cure. People need to start realizing that physicians are not only not infallible but that they dont know more about your health than you do, they are just trained to read the tests better. If your physician makes fun of you for using online sources or doing your own research then you are dealing with just another pompous ass and you need to find a real healthcare professional.
I would even go one further and say that physicians need to pull their collective heads out of their asses and realize that apnea is not a condition itself but the symptom of something else but that again is a rant for another time.