[Yesterday: road 68 2.42 miles]
Long ago I snored a bit and my wife told me I needed to work on that. So I learned to breathe only through my nose when I sleep. I think I’m actually pretty good at it.
But the tricky thing is that, when I’m asleep maybe I forget or something, who’s to say. I start off with nose-breathing and in the morning I’m still nose-breathing, but in between???
So she sent me off to a sleep clinic. She had done a sleep clinic long ago where she slept at the hospital and they monitored her and I think the verdict there was that her sleep was fine.
So I went to the sleep clinic and by then they had switched over to using a chest mounted monitor thing along with a finger pincher probe and directions to wear this thing all night. Which I did, and it fell off and I got tangled in the wires and other things happened which made my sleep not very good…
But Low And Behold! you have sleep apnea, so says the devices so it must be right! and I was allocated a CPAP machine and a nice visit to a mostly clueless lady at the place where you pick up crutches and wheelchairs.
Over time I went through a number of mask configurations and finally figured out that the sizes (S/M/L) didn’t actually fit, but I could work with a L if I put it on just right. And I wore my CPAP machine for over a year. The machine has a cell-phone connection telling central-control (somewhere?) what my readings are.
Then we moved. And I quit wearing my CPAP machine. It wasn’t helping me sleep better, I still woke up in the middle of the night when the cat wanted out or I needed to use the bathroom, etc. Moving gave me a couple of weeks of being in a cool, quiet, dark, animal-less place. I slept great. I was happy. The rest of the household congregated and I continued on without the machine.
Then I had a stroke last winter and one of the follow-ups was to go to the Sleep Clinic (in another place altogether) which was attached to the pulminologist office. And there they said I should go back to my CPAP machine. And if I did it regularly (be “in compliance”) we could see about maybe doing something else or different.
So I did that. And I’ve worn the confounded thing for over a month and went back to my appointment in early August and the prescription was, keep doing that for another year.
Now, I was able to pin down what actual figure they are looking for. The machine reports how many “incidents per hour” are happening. They told me the desired number is “under 5” and I’m now almost always in the less-than-one zone.
But! The only way to measure the number of incidents is to wear the machine! So I could be just fine without the machine but I can’t prove that.
I confess I am flirting with non-compliance again. I slept pretty well last two nights without it. I still woke up at 3:30 or thereabouts, but no one is complaining about snoring.
I’m usually pretty “compliant” about things. And as I get older I want to engender a pattern of doing what I am asked to do.
I would love to go to the sleep clinic and talk about sleep, or to give me tips about sleeping better. Unfortunately, I’ve been to two sleep clinics now and my basic understanding is that they are a pipeline for placing CPAP machines in households across the nation.