Every 30 seconds
The doctor burst into the room, a concerned look on his face.
“You’re on CPAP, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re on CPAP?” he repeated.
“Um yes, for many years. I went through the sleep study just to get a new baseline.”
“Good. Let me just go check a few notes in my office.”
I knew it wasn’t going to be good. The night of the sleep study was just miserable for me, because I can no longer sleep without a CPAP. My sleep was fractured, and it felt like I hadn’t slept at all.
I was right.
“Congratulations, you’re #1″, he told me as I was leaving.
“#1?”
“The worst we’ve ever seen,” he said, pointing at the number “126″, indicating the number of sleep interruptions I experienced per hour during my sleep study.
Every 30 seconds.
“A dubious honor”, was all I could think to say.
If your doctor is recommending a sleep study, do it. Among the other figures he pointed out to me was that my blood oxygen dropped to 82% without CPAP, and that was after just a few hours. Who knows how low it could go over the course of a night. The stress on the heart and brain would be tremendous.
I honestly believe that if I hadn’t met my wife, who insisted I do something about my snoring and the way I stop breathing at night eight years ago, I’d be dead by now. Suffocated in my sleep, maybe, or a heart attack from the strain of living without deep sleep. Or a fiery car accident when I fell asleep at the wheel, maybe with my wife and kids in the car with me.
Something to think about.
