Friday, March 09, 2007

Have trouble sleeping?

... you ain't the only one: How some folks try to manage when no snooze is bad news.

4 comments:

  1. I have severe sleep apnea and love to go on vacation, so appreciated Paula Marantz Cohen going into the travel aspects of sleep disorders.

    With sleep apnea, I either have to subconsiously auto-start myself back to breathing before each and every two-minute interval (as falling asleep causes my throat muscles to relax and close shut, leaving no room for air), thus never truly falling to sleep into REM and such; or I sleep with a CPAP machine that continuously blows air into my nose while my mouth is shut, to keep enough pressure in my air passage, that it cannot close.

    How to keep someone awake: blow in their nose all night, maybe.

    Two ways I surprise myself at night are: to have to sneeze; or, my favorite, to open my mouth by mistake and awaken feeling like a suddenly-deflating balloon.

    If you consider the machine noise, the air blowing against skin noises (blow against your arm, for instance), the tube leading from the CPAP machine to the mask, the mask that should but cannot stay in place all night, and you can realize that such a machine is, what would otherwise be devised, to torturously keep a person from sleeping well.

    Vacations are a time to both get away and to relax. But as George Carlin has noted, wherever you go, there you are. And as someone with a sleep disorder, this means being tired all vacation long, and returning to work physically just as I left, unrested.

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  2. Gee, Rus, that's just awful. I am amazed that you retain a sense of humor about this. What is the cause, if I may ask.

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  3. Hi Frank,

    I picked up sleep apnea after my heart attack when I flatlined. It seems like my body is relaxing way too much, as if to replicate the death state, as if I learned how to be dead.

    That is the sense I get, and may not hit the nail on the head. Maybe I was going to have sleep apnea anyway, and it was coincidental.

    Sleep apnea leads to heart attacks. But, I never had the problem before. So this makes no sense applied to my situation. The problem was dramatically conspicuous following on the heels of the heart attack.

    Diagnosis was delayed, because my fatigue began after the heart attack, which damaged my heart, killing layers of muscle, about half, which explained fatigue. I was following all my medication, doing all the exercises that I was supposed to, and so after time, the doctor looked elsewhere to explain my peristent complaint of being exhausted all the time.

    The fatigue, when not using a CPAP machine, is peculiar. I can go through a night, waking to consciousness here and there as if with insomnia. Some nights, I would just wake at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and seriously consider whether I should stay up for the day. The reason this would make sense to me, is that sleep is not restful. There is no sense of benefit from waking at say 6:00 versus waking at 2:00. Being rested does not follow from sleeping. The reason I would go back to bed, would be the cognitive processing of the idea that I ought to get more sleep than I had already.

    But cause? My sense is that it had something to do with having the heart attack, and I think it had something to do with my being dead too long.

    Yours,
    Rus

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  4. I have serious, serious insomnia too. I just wrote about it on my blog. Thanks for this!

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