Sleep study part 2

Last night I went in for a CPAP test, to see how much air flow I need from the machine to keep breathing without pumping air into my stomach.

I was brushing my teeth and studying the emergency exit map in the bathroom when I noticed that I had unwittingly chosen the men's bathroom. There was no sign on the outside of it, and no indication in the bathroom itself that it might have a gender preference. There wasn't a power tool or classic car motif and it didn't smell off at all. Huh.

I didn't know that there were a variety of masks to choose from. The one I started with looks something like a very heavy duty nasal cannula. There were two largish tubes which each rested snugly against a nostril. Getting used to air being forced into my lungs was a bit of a struggle at first, but after a while it was second nature. I got a good 2 hours of sleep before the air exploded out of my mouth and I woke up in a panic. I took a moment to breathe normally and calm down then tried to replace the nose piece but couldn't stomach it.

We cycled through the other masks with varying degrees of disaster, which resulted in a few instances of me dozing and getting more air blasted out of my mouth despite a chinstrap fastened tightly around my head. The final arrangement had a nose mask and chin strap so tight on my face that by the time I gave up on sleeping at 5:30, my front teeth hurt.

I may have to repeat the entire thing. The tech blamed the mouth air on sinus congestion, which I didn't feel I had. If I have to do it again I'll have to go in with nasal sprays. So I get to wait another week and a half to find out if I have to schedule another sleep study, and if I do then I have to wait at least a week for that. Following another sleep study, I'll have to wait yet another week to a week and a half for a consult.

And Man wonders why I waited so long to get this looked at. It's like going in for a cough and getting a work up for pneumonia. You end up glad your life will improve/be saved, but there's a certain amount of chagrin when it ends up taking 20x as long as you wanted and costing x amount more in gas and stress.

Did I mention: after a series of apnea episodes, my blood oxygen saturation gets down to 76%. According to this website:

If your low blood oxygen levels become extreme enough (low 80% to upper 70% oxygen saturation), you face the possibility that your heart will spontaneously stop.

So, you can imagine that I'll be following up a little more aggressively in the future. I'm not ready to die.

At the end of the study, they ask you a series to questions (how was your stay? do you feel you rested more or less than you usually do? how long do you think it took you to fall asleep last night?) one of which was "did you dream? If so, what was your dream?" I thought about that, and recalled something about a winged elf, having an enormously flabby stomach like a post-birth octo-mom, and trying to find a medieval inn where I could stable my horse and take my armor off. I jotted down "flying, and trying to find a hotel." I mean, how long could I sit and really write about my subconscious body issues and deep desire to just find a place to rest??

The hardest thing to get used to is that instead of taking a breath until my lungs were half full and then releasing it until my lungs were mostly empty, the CPAP machine kept my lungs filled all the way and breathing out could not be completely accomplished. Training your body to breathe an entirely different way and then sleep while doing it is quite the undertaking.

The tech removed the adhesives holding the electrodes on with a moderate amount of hair removal into the bargain. They should just make it a sleep clinic/waxing salon and make a bit more money for the same amount of pain.

Then I drove home and took a 4 hour nap.