Sleep Apnea Again

Brother Dan continues his struggle with the effects of his stroke. He has been feeling exhausted, especially in the afternoon, and so made a couple visits to his doctor. One visit resulted in an adjustment to his high blood pressure meds; at the second the doctor suggested he get checked out for sleep apnea.

He went in Saturday night for the sleep test where they stick all sorts of electrodes to your upper body and head and tell you, all tangled up in wires, to go to sleep on a strange bed. Dan got to sleep pretty quickly, and at 1:30 AM they brought in the sleep apnea mask for him to try out. That’s a pretty sure sign that the tech detected sleep apnea. If they don’t detect it, they don’t have you use the mask; if they do detect it, they have you try it out to see if it helps.

So now Dan will have to get used to the agonies of the sleep apnea cure, the mask, the air flow machine, waking up with the tube completely around your neck. And there’s nothing quite like trying to sleep with a sleep apnea mask while suffering from a cold.

Still, if it helps him to feel less tired, that’s for best…and maybe more than that is involved because, looking into the issue, Brother Dan came across the results of a study indicating a significant correlation between sleep apnea and strokes.

Sort of scary….

An update: just got off the phone with Brother Dan.  The results of his sleep test indicate that he has 52,8 episodes of disturbed sleep per hour.  This puts him in the range of “severe” sleep apnea.  He will be getting his machine and mask soon.

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