Hereditary Surprise Part Infinity: Sleep Apnea
Gauging what is or isn’t a valid medical concern as someone who experiences health anxiety is an unhappy exercise with no cooldown. Can any reassurance stick, or would hearing bad news be better — if only to eliminate the unlimited, ignorance-based guesswork? Meanwhile, lightheadedness caused by my anxiety leads me up and down a banal Mobius strip, with the anxiety leading to lightheadness leading to anxiety, and on and on.
That's while I'm awake, but I always suspected my sleeping self was busy but largely unbothered...save for the few times a night I wake up seemingly out of breath, sometimes gasping. This kind of interruption was annoying, but not, I thought at first, the sign of anything stranger or stronger. My wife assured me that I usually don’t snore; I fall asleep easily and sleep usually soundly. But after one too many gasps, I began to experience existential worry — and then, much later — the inching toward doing something about it. I turned my paranoia over to the experts, and after speaking with some health professionals about first steps, I was directed to the REM Sleep Center, positioned aptly on Medical Parkway. I would bet a good night’s sleep that the office was once a regular house, like where people lived, and walking in you felt a kind of intimacy that most medical offices work to confound — the waiting area was small, softly lit and nearly cozy. I waited a bit in the apparently empty office, and then my sleep specialist came in from her lunch.
We spoke about the contraption I was to wear for two nights during my sleep study: a kind of band goes around your chest (you’re supposed to wear a t-shirt to bed and the band goes over that, something which I forgot the second night) and on the band is an electronic device you turn on when you’re ready for bed, and which you turn off when you wake up. The device is hooked up to a tube, and you stick your nose on the tube and work to ignore it and fall asleep.
Sleeping with the belt/device/tube was less difficult than I thought, and even forgetting the t-shirt rule, the REM Sleep Center was able to make a definitive ruling about my sleep. I have sleep apnea — specifically "obstructive sleep apnea G 47.33." The study concentrated on just one of my two days, oddly, and showed me asleep from 10:34ish to 6:43ish (both times had fifty-nine seconds, exactly, tacked onto the end). My so-called "sleep efficiency" was 81.6 percent, which sounds good, but more alarming were "27 scored apneas and 122 scored hypopneas with 3% desaturations." My understanding after talking to an ENT is that "apeneas" are a cessation of breathing, and "hypopneas" are when breathing becomes shallow. My snoring count was low, and my "mean heart rate was 52 beats per minute." The lowest my heart dipped was to 38 beats per minute, and at highest was 79 beats per minute.
So what are we talking about when we talk about sleep apnea? I really can't do better here than to just turn to the experts; the NIH simply states that sleep apnea "is a common condition that occurs when your breathing stops and restarts many times while you sleep." Of the two flavors of sleep apnea — obstructive and central — most, including I, have the former. The NIH cites a possibilities for why a person may have obstructive sleep apnea, including "large tonsils" (rude?), obesity and hormones, but my ENT put the blame for mine on genetics, an unhappy heredity surprise that popped up, apparently, here in my (let's say early) forties.
And like learning a new word, mentions of my condition suddenly leapt out of obscurity to be heard everywhere…in my case, the terms “CPAP” and “sleep apnea” pop through podcast listens like personal, previously-veiled communications in what was once a bed of noise (I also saw a CPAP machine sitting for sale at an estate sale a month ago, though I think the likelihood of it being salvaged for future use is poor). It seems like I now know more and more people who know people who have the same condition I do, and while I’m still getting used to the machine (the app I use to track my CPAP progress tells me I’m working at around three hours a night, which I’m told is typical) I am envious of because I’ve heard the term “life-changing” enough times in reference to treatment that I’m wondering when the Big Change will happen for me.
I have, though, encountered one specific difference in my sleep — deeper and more vivid dreams. While my body was warm and safe this early morning, my mind was simultaneously working through a trio of crises, including but not limited a very long tableau involving A$AP Rocky defecting to North Korea (don't ask — I don't know).
Even when my dreams are just bizarre instead of strictly ‘anxious,’ it seems wrong to want less of them. A person can imagine the strength of the unconscious mind as a sign of the health of the body, which, now connected by tube to an air machine, can finally relax at night and lean into the important mental work of creating disjointed scenarios for the waking mind to groggily process over coffee the next morning.
