I’ve snored most of my life and now have been diagnosed with sleep apnea. This means that I stop breathing while I’m asleep. It doesn’t sound awful until you start reading more about it and realize the lack of oxygen and the lack of real sleep can kill you over time. Even before it kills you, it can wreck havoc on your life.

For myself, I’d been going to bed earlier and earlier and still woke up exhausted and usually with a headache it would take me most of the day to get rid of, only to have a headache the next day as well. I had no energy and kept forgetting things all the time. I would constantly be in danger of falling asleep at my desk and there were times I’d take a nap in the car before driving home, lest I fall asleep at the wheel. What I had been putting down to stress and a toxic Evil Day Job turned out to be something more – sleep apnea.

I went for a sleep study where they hook you up to all sorts of monitoring equipment and then you get to (try to) sleep while they monitor what’s going on. They woke me up partway through the night and put me on a CPAP machine for the rest of the night and adjusted the pressure until they got rid of most of the incidents of apnea and hypopnea.

I went back a week later and picked up my diagnosis and a rental machine plus mask and various accouterments. I’ve had claustrophobia for years and thought I would really suffer but there’s only been one night in the three months since I went on CPAP that I didn’t use the machine and it sucked so badly, I never missed another night. Now it’s almost pavlovian – I get into bed and put on the mask, turn on the machine and read for about ten minutes then go to sleep.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that it’s NOT sexy. It’s not noisy but having a big mask tied to your face with a hose leading off the bed is sorta… weird. Mr. Maura does say that the breeze from the mask is much easier to cope with than my snoring.

I highly recommend everyone look at the symptoms of sleep apnea and, if they feel they might have it, get tested. There are several treatment options but I chose CPAP because it was non-invasive and pretty well proven. I know a lot of CPAP users hate the fact they are using a machine but I guess my pragmatism shows in that I feel liberated by getting real sleep and rest rather than imprisoned by a machine. The reality is that I do have sleep apnea – I can choose how to treat it or even not to treat it, but a price is associated with every one of these choices. The CPAP is my choice and I’ll make the most of it.

I’m also going to work at losing weight but there’s no guarantee that it will help my apnea. It may make no change at all. The idea that sleep apnea only affects the overweight is a huge myth that I think encourages people who should be checked to not do so because they aren’t overweight. It’s all about individual anatomy and muscle/sleep behavior.

I’m already doing much better. I really sleep and I wake up on my own. I no longer wake up with headaches and I don’t try to fall asleep at my desk anymore. Now when I’m tired, it seems to be a more normal tired – not exhaustion.

I’m really tempted to be-dazzle my mask, though. I wonder if that would make it feel any sexier?