My issues with fatigue and sleep apnea are documented. I had a sleep study that revealed that I did indeed have obstructive sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome. I was waking between 16 and 30 times an hour. An hour people, 16 times what is that like once every….four minutes and 30 times an hour….once every 2 minutes? Who can get any sleep and/or rest at that rate?
My diagnosis is really odd and it’s kind of ironic that people have made fun of me for a few of the very things that are now, at the ripe age of 40, are dealing me misery.
Mostly on that list of things is the one I put in bold. I get up and eat in my sleep and have no recollection of it at all. I have the physical changes which cause me not to rest, like changes in breathing, heart rate, blood pressure and oh, the sweats, I thought that was a hormonal issue. ARGH!
Either way, my insurance decided that the one good method of help that I had, which was the drug Provigil, was not necessary and they were only going to pay for it if I had a prior authorization from my physician. Sounds simple enough right? It may or may not be. Who knows if they will approve it or not, but in the mean time, what’s a girl to do? The month’s supply cost in the neighborhood of $500. Yea, I’ll just throw a few hundred bucks toward the pharmacy and run away with my meds. PUHLEEEZE!
Some say it’s a ploy by the drug company because provigils patent runs out in 2012 and so they invented a sister drug called Nuvigil which has a patent til 2023. Boooyah I cry…..how ridiculous is this. The drug company has this bright idea, 3 years early, that if they get everyone to switch to nuvigil before they can get provigil as a generic, they can still make a fortune off of the poor unsuspecting souls like me.
Enter problem number 4,984,234,545 – the side effects. I never had any side effects of provigil. Never, none, not one. I’ve been taking Nuvigil for 5 days now and not only am I very very very sleepy, I have a monstrous headache. Supposedly the nuvigil has a longer life through-out the day and should be helping me keep the sleepy-time woes away longer. Instead, it hasn’t even remotely done that, I am back to a good 12 to 14 hours a day for sleep. And the headache…well screw that. If I am going to be sleepy anyway, why have a headache while I am awake and battling the groggy state?
I don’t get it people. And why is it that we are against socialized medicine?
Of course, you all know I’m being precocious because I happen to have the greatest husband in the world. He was only mild miffed when he saw some of my latest purchases through paypal. And, miffed? Well, even that’s not a good word. What he said was “no more asking for forgiveness not permission next, mmkay?â€
Who can turn that down? But, anyway, back to how he tried to kill me. It’s a long story, I’ll make it as quick as possible. It all started about 3 years ago we learned that I have Sleep Apnea . Which unless you are familiar with it, you probably don’t understand but if you have ever slept with someone who has it and they sound like they should be on a cartoon and the walls should be closing in and then blowing out every few minutes because of the noise…then you understand.
Or perhaps you sleep with someone who does snore but more importantly, they quit breathing during the night which causes them to jerk and twitch and make this awful sign of gasping for air.
Look a whole paragraph and only one sentence…I didn’t know I had it in me…
I digress.
Or perhaps, you’ve slept with someone who wears one of these .
and in that case, you know that breathing is might important and even though that little face masks is ugly, breathing and thus living…a bit much more so.
These masks come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and some cover the nose and some just go in the mouth and blah blah blah. The fact of the matter is, when I lay down at night, I look like this
Sexy uh? Well I know you are all wondering what this has to do with my husband trying to kill me. Iâ€m getting there, can you hang on and trudge through some mud with me to get there?
Now, here’s the deal, that thing is hooked to an even larger piece of equipment by a large tubing and it blows air in your face all night. Thus, by having a constant flow of air going in your face, you are certain to breathe more uniformly.
May I digress once again? I promise, he did try to kill me.
When I had my sleep study done for the first time, it was really agitating. But, the news from the study was even more so. You see, not only did I snore (and without my CPAP machine now, I snore really loud – just ask my roommate at Mom 2.0 SummitEsther who was kind enough to “give†me sleeping space – and then I didn’t take the machine because duh who wants to look at that frightening sight – and I ended up keeping her awake most of the night on Friday night – Sorry Esther)
Ok, you did say it was ok to digress before telling about the actually killing right?
Ok, so, for me it worked like this, let’s say I went to sleep at 12:00 AM I’m using that because it is easy. Here’s what the night basically looked like for me…
12:00 AM sleep
12:03 quit breathing, woke up, back to sleep
12:06 quit breathing, woke up, back to sleep
12:09 quit breathing, woke up, back to sleep
Yea, 16 times in one hour, I woke up because I quit breathing. I mean it’s bad enough that my brain is hardwired in such a crazy way that it forgets I need to sleep at all, it at least knew to wake up when I quit breathing…..which was mildly annoying for me as I never got much rest and increasingly annoying for my husband who was also not getting much rest. (He who is in there now snoring so loud I checked to see if the walls were sucking up his nose and back out quite hysterically. But, no, he’s good)
So, to the part where he tried to kill me.
One night this week after I had gone to bed, Mini Me had joined me already and Boy Genius had fallen asleep on the sofa. About midnight, the electricity went off. Now, I don’t know if you would know this without me telling you but that machine…the one that blows air in my face….it runs off of electricity.
So, no electricity, no machine. No machine, no air. No air, no breathing. No breathing, not alive. You get my drift, eh? Anyway, the deal is with that mask I showed you up in the first picture, well naturally if there’s no air blowing in it….and there’s only this tiny whole for air to go out of it……without electricity…the ultimate end is..no air, no breathing, no living.
Do you think my husband came to the bedroom (he did get up and come to bed by the way) and explained to me that the electricity was off and I needed to take the mask off? No, instead, he comes in the room and his very presence stirred my sleep (I told you, I have serious sleep issues) and all of the sudden…gasp gasp…gasp…I can’t breathe…gasp gasp….
I go in to a raging tyrant according to him because “omg I can’t breath, what is this thing on my face, omg I can’t breath, what did you do?†He tried to settle me down and he helps me get the mask off. And I’m sure he laugh a lot about it at the time because when he told me about later, he laughed more than I should have allowed him to, considering he tried to kill me.
Now, listen, I’ve explained here how serious my sleep issues are and since I did just tell you that my brain doesn’t know it has to sleep sometime or another and then when I do sleep, any little grunt or move will wake me, you have to know that I take some killer sleeping medication.
Well, when I say killer, I didn’t necessary mean for some one to actually take the opportunity to ..er…yea, kill me.
What was he thinking? He knew I was trapped inside that mask? He knew I couldn’t breath? Heck I can’t sleep and breath on my own without the darn machine in the first place, how in the heck am I suppose to sleep when I am muzzled with a machine that’s not blowing air?
Yea, I bet you anything there’s a brand new life insurance policy about me floating around out there some where. I bet you.
Today around 11 AM I was feeling very groggy. I woke with a headache this morning, so I took 3 excedrin. And, with that, the sleepy feeling got stronger and stronger. So, I did something I’ve been threatening to do for a long time.
I inflated the bouncy house in an empty room, I got a blanket, my cell phone and a small sheet (I don’t know why, just because it was soft, and I honestly mean that because obviously, it was smaller than my leg so I couldn’t lay on it or anything). I crawled in the bouncy house with my goods and snoozed. The blower on the bouncy house is kind of loud plus I got particularly close to it. And, I couldn’t hear a sound. Children, 22 of them, all ages, hollering, screaming, playing, crying and I heard nothing. It was awesome!
The only thing I’ll do differently tomorrow? I’ll get a pillow too. It was that awesome people.