laneys.info Beware of Yankees, drunks, and loose women.

Back in August, I posted a blog entry in which I mentioned waking up feeling more exhausted than when I went to bed.  That situation hasn't really changed in these two months and so I finally called my doctor.  I'll be visiting a specialist on Monday to begin an evaluation for sleep apnea - a condition my father developed when he was about my age.

Correction: my appointment is actually for Monday, October 30.

The basic issue with sleep apnea is that your body forgets to breathe while you're sleeping.  The brain has to keep reminding you to breathe, which prevents you from ever entering REM sleep.  Without REM sleep, all sorts of interesting and odd things can begin to happen.  Think of it as the biological version of the way your computer starts to slow down and act weird when you've gone a long time without clearing out the temporary files and other accumulated cruft and running a full defrag.  Apparently, REM sleep is your brain's maintenance window, during which it defrags and reboots.  If I really have sleep apnea - and based on Julie's observations, I probably do - it is very likely that I will spend the rest of my life sleeping in a Darth Vader mask known as a CPAP.  The bright side will be that once I get used to the mask, I should begin to feel rested again and it will significantly reduce my chance of dying in the night from a heart attack or stroke.  (From what I've learned, I'll always start breathing again, so there's no chance that I'll asphyxiate, but while I'm not breathing my blood pressure is shooting sky-high, making cardiac trauma more likely.)

I'm really quite sad that I've started to fall apart so soon.  I've always known that, God willing, I would begin having issues with my body as it ages.  But I never thought I would begin to fall apart while still in my thirties.  I suppose I had always thought that it would happen "some time later," much in the same way that victims of crime or an accident always believed that it would happen to someone else.  Now that I know my father started all this when he was in his thirties, I guess I should get used to the idea...