Wednesday, March 31, 2004
I Can’t Wait
To be normal! At least, what I imagine as normal.
As regular readers know, I recently went for a sleep lab test to see if I had sleep apnea or what. This was inspired by my absurd snoring, which can be accompanied by apparent difficulty breathing. This went unobserved until Deb came along.
Sure enough, they want to put me on one of those positive pressure breathing machines that is the treatment of choice. I still object to receiving no results of the test but a call from someone checking whether my insurance would pay for medical hardware. My nephew got a report when he did the test; how many times an hour he stopped breathing and so forth.
Someone has offered to give me one of the machines, which I will pick up Thursday evening near, it turns out, the nearest Krispy Kreme. I’ve never tried them, Deb misses them, and my brother highly recommends them, so we’ll go even if Fresh Hot doesn’t apply.
Meanwhile, now that I know what is going on, it’s glaringly obvious. I’ve walked around with chronic fatigue since I was sixteen. It’s frustrating, because if I functioned as well regularly as I do when I am “with it,” I would be an entirely different person. Most of the time, I feel like I am in a daze. Since nobody could or would identify the problem or even believe it existed, I came to accept this as normal. Just as I accepted it as normal that I sometimes wake up several times a night, just that I know of.
Now I know why I go to the office and spend some days barely awake and, as a result, barely able to do anything. And why I often have to nap, sometimes for hours, in the middle of the day. And why number of hours of sleep doesn’t always correspond with how refreshed I am. And why I wake up panting or feeling like I am drowning sometimes. And why I have trouble concentrating, remembering things, or thinking straight all too often.
I can’t wait to get the machine, get a mask to match, get it callibrated, and see how it changes the way I feel and function. My first reaction was horror at having to hook to something to help me breathe properly in my sleep, but increasingly I feel like I ought have had it many years ago. Especially at times like this, when I am awake at 4:00 AM or so, wide enough to feel like I shouldn’t bother to try to sleep any more for now, yet feel dazed enough to sleep for the next day. I wandered over to the computer to kill a little time before I feel like running the nightly sleeping race again. As I will, for the good it apparently will do me.
People tell me that treatment for apnea has completely transformed their lives. I am so ready! Can you imagine, going to sleep and getting rested? Wow!