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Feeling tired all the time? Maybe there's an easy fix!
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Location: Blogs Sly Comments |
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| Posted by: Emory Schley |
4/22/2007 7:06 AM |
I had gotten to a point in my life where I was tired all the time. Sleeping more didn’t seem to help as much as it should have. I ascribed this condition to the fact that I was just getting older, and no part of my body was working like it did when I was younger, which seemed more or less reasonable to me.
Then my wife, an asthma patient, went to her doctor a couple of years back, and he detected something that made him refer her to a sleep specialist. She spent the night in one of those sleep laboratories that seem to be popping up all over the place lately. The results of her night in the sleep lab indicated she was suffering from sleep apnea, a condition in which you awaken dozens, perhaps hundreds of times each night, due to lack of oxygen. The body, for whatever reason, just stops breathing as deeply as it should, and your oxygen levels drop precipitously. Sometimes, it’s due to an obstruction in the throat caused by the patient’s muscles relaxing too much and closing or restricting the airway in the throat. Other conditions can contribute to the problem as well.
The patient is not necessarily aware of all these awakenings. They just think they’ve been sleeping fitfully, which is quite true, of course.
One of the current treatments for sleep apnea is to have the patient start using a CPAP machine. This Constant Positive Air Pressure device is actually a pump attached to a hose. The hose, in turn, is attached to a mask which covers your mouth and nose. The CPAP machine forces a stream of air down your throat, keeping your airway open. Although you might think otherwise, the CPAP machine is pretty quiet, and you’re usually unaware that it’s running at all. After using one of these machines for a couple of months, my wife was of the opinion that she was feeling much better.
Then our adult son was similarly diagnosed, and he too, now sleeps with a CPAP device. Next was my turn. A night in the sleep laboratory established that I was a good candidate for the CPAP routine. Since last August, I’ve been using one of those silent pumps every night. And now, our daughter seems like she’s about to join the rest of the family in “CPAP Paradise.”
It’s really amazing what medical science is coming up with these days. But, you might ask, do these machines really work? Well, my wife says she feels better, I feel much more rested, my son says he can’t sleep without one. If you’ve been having trouble with feeling groggy all the time, perhaps you might ask your doctor if a sleep study would be appropriate. It can’t hurt! |
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