I have heavy sleep apnea and have used a breathing machine every night for about a month now. I've only taken brief daytime naps without it.
Several years ago, I made a habit of getting up very early in the morning, but these past few years I noticed myself getting more and more tired in the morning and being unable to wake up as early as I liked. At someone's recommendation I went into a few overnight sleep studies and tested positive for sleep apnea.
The first night I used the breathing machine, it was almost miraculous. I only had about 4 hours of sleep and I felt better rested than nights that I would get 7-8 hours. My experience with it so far has been mixed - the machine does not guarantee a good night's rest but only gives the sleeper a "fair chance" at one.
I haven't thought about alternative cures, but for sleep apnea, it doesn't seem like there can be any. The breathing machine doesn't function on a chemical level, all it does is pump air into the breather's nose to ensure that he receives enough oxygen during the night and doesn't wake up from choking and cessation of breath. The cause of sleep apnea is not chemical, but physical. So short of surgery, if it is even possible, what sort of alternate cure could there be?
As to making the apnea worse, it doesn't seem likely. All the machine does is ensure continued breathing. There are cases of people becoming psychologically dependent on the machine who "cannot" sleep without it. The technician in one of the sleep studies told me that occasionally when someone's insurance plan changes and the new one no longer covers the breathing machine, they will need to go to an overnight sleep study without the machine to show that they are in physical need of the machine, without which they cannot function, but they end up being unable to sleep long enough to gather sufficient data since they cannot fall asleep without the machine.
This seems to be a problem in the mind, and not with the machine. Without the machine, at worse, it would seem that I would revert to having restless sleep and tired mornings.
Of course, I am also concerned about becoming dependent on the machine. It doesn't seem like something one could drag to a monastery or seminary.
My experience duplicates your own.
I had a friend who got an appliance for his mouth from a specialist to relieve his
sleep apnea. The device is custom formed for your oral cavity, and its purpose is
to keep your tongue in a forward position. Normally, when you sleep, your
muscles relax, including the throat and tongue muscles, which allows you tongue
to settle back into your throat. Obviously, this is more the case when you are
face up, or sleeping on your back. Whether you use a pillow or not is of little
importance. So, by keeping the tongue forward, the soft palate is not pressured
to close, and then you can breathe normally through the nose, with mouth closed.
There is another muscular contribution to apnea: the soft tissues at the soft palate
tend to sag in sleep, making the air passage through the nose more restricted.
This is accentuated by the tongue drooping backward.
I have heard "experts" proclaim that nobody is able to feel when their soft
palate is open or closed. That's not true. I can ALWAYS tell whether mine is open
or closed, provided I'm awake! This is because of my history with allergies as
a child, when I discovered that by closing my soft palate and thereby not
breathing through my nose, the allergens in the air would not affect my sinuses.
So me and my soft palate "go way back." Later, learning to sing, lessons that
attempted to teach me how to open my soft palate were unnecessary, to the
amazement of my voice coach. I guess there's a first time for everything.
C-PAP machines provide a gentle, continuous positive pressure of air over the
mouth and nose, allowing for exhalation by the fact of increased pressure from
the breathing out. It's a simple theory, and it works okay, so long as the other
things are all right. For me, they are not all right. And from what I hear, I am not
alone. I had enormous relief the first night I used my C-PAP. I was really
excited about it. I thought I was cured forever, alleluia!
But it only lasted a few days. After about a week, I started to have problems, etc.
It is now many years later and I have not used one for about 7 years. They need
regular maintenance, and you have to keep replacing the face mask/apparatus,
because they wear out. Even the very highest quality face gear wears out, and
they can cost hundreds of dollars. Your insurance probably won't cover those,
because there are cheaper options. I was a certified SCUBA diver, and the face
mouthpieces for diving are much less expensive than the CPAP rigs. And they are
more technically demanding, for use in salt water environments and all. I
suspect the CPAP devices are especially pricey because they are medical devices
and therefore 4 times what they're worth due to all the fingers in the pie, so to
speak.
Without some kind of device, I don't get very good sleep. And that's not good.
One thing that did help a lot was an operation I had, from an excellent IENT
surgeon, when he went in and did a biopsy for suspected tumor in my throat. The
tumor was negative, only a fungus, or a "wart." But while he was in there, and I
was under general anaesthesia, he removed a small portion of soft palate tissue,
and cauterized it or whatever. That took a few days to heal up, but then I was
ever since much more able to breathe freely on one side (deviated septum makes
the other nostril much less passable anyway). I was fortunate that he was able to
do this all at the same time, to save the expense of an elective surgery. My
insurance would not accept the soft palate procedure as a necessary one. Go
figure.
Overall, sleep apnea is a dangerous thing. It can kill you. Your body's oxygen
concentration gradually decreases with reduced air in sleep, until such time as all
of your nervous system FLASHES with a shock to try and wake you up. It's your
body's last chance to preserve itself. People who die from suffocation must
experience this involuntary "shocking" as their consciousness wanes. Their body
would lurch, as if convulsing. One time, I awoke at night standing up in my bed,
having arisen suddenly and spontaneously. I was awake as I rose up, as in one
movement to my feet. I'm not sure how I did that, because I haven't been able to
duplicate it by deliberate action.
When your oxygen level gets too low, many nerves "fire" at the same time, I like
to think of it as an epileptic seizure, but medical people correct me saying that's a
different kind of thing. Whatever. I guess I've never had an epileptic seizure. But
when I had two different sleep studies, they informed me that I have between
100 and 300 such events every night when I sleep, face up on my back. I wanted
to have the physical charts that were drawn by the computer, a stack about two
feet tall, but they told me they can't give it to me. It has to be shredded. I just
wanted to see it and study it, but they looked sternly at me and said, "NO."
This broad-spectrum shocking is stressful for your heart. Also, when you spend a
lot of time with low oxygen levels, it's not good for nerves and internal organs.
The presence of oxygen in the blood is very important for health, on several
different levels. So sleep apnea effectively causes an acceleration of the aging
process. And on a really bad day, it can be "curtains."
Topic: Sleep Apnea (Read 3099 times)