Sleep

My wife has a sleep disorder: me.

As I wrote about recently, I don't sleep well at night and my primary care physician referred me to a sleep specialist who conducted an overnight sleep study to analyze my sleep patterns. I had a follow-up visit with this sleep specialist yesterday and learned that I in fact have two sleep disorders: like many people, I have sleep apnea, an intermittent interruption of breathing while I sleep. While I'm not consciously aware of it, this cessation of breathing causes me to wake up, keeping me from entering into, and staying in, the dreaming, restful period of sleep.

We've all heard people snore, and the fact is that most people can get used to someone else's snoring and sleep through the noise. My snoring isn't what keeps Shel up at night. I toss and turn throughout the night, flopping my limbs, twitching and flailing. Anyone who has ever had a "falling dream," one in which they experience a sudden and unexpected sensation of falling, knows that the normal response is to jerk all of ones limbs upward as though to catch themself. Shel says that this is the best comparison for the movement that I exhibit all night long, every night. This is called periodic limb movement disorder. Imagine for a moment what it's like to try to sleep while somebody bounces on the bed.

The doctor, when reviewing the results of my sleep study, said "This is the fun part: how many times do you think you woke up during the night?"

Before I tell you what my answer to him was, I'll ask you, my readers, to ask yourself how many times you wake up during the average night.

Knowing that my estimate would be low, I said "Three," since I remember waking up three times during the study. It turns out that while I slept on my back, I woke up an average of 55 times per hour. When I wasn't on my back, I only woke up an average of 7.5 times per hour.

I'm going back for another sleep study next week, this time wearing a cpap machine while I sleep to address the snoring

In the meantime, the doctor started me on a drug which is basically a proto-dopamine which my body needs to produce the dopamine that will keep me from twitching. I never expect any drug to perfectly effective, and certainly not right away, but last night was the first time I took this stuff and Shel reports that I didn't twitch at all last night, moving only in the way that people normally do when they sleep, and that my snoring was even reduced dramatically.

The real bonus in all this for me (other than not keeping Shel awake all night) is that I think I feel more rested today than I normally do. I haven't had a nap today and I don't feel like I need one, and that's unusual.

A great start to a new future? Maybe. I'll keep you posted.