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Sleepless

I have suffered from sleep apnea for a while now. It was diagnosed with a sleep study in 2003 but my wife swears that my snoring was worsening for some time before that, until she thought that it was a symptom and not a transient problem, thus the sleep study.

My windpipe closes off when I sleep naturally, and I treat it as thousands of others do with a medical air-pump, a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure or CPAP device.

Occasionally, during power outages, I am unable to use the CPAP. When that occurs I dream of suffocating and gesturing for help to those around me. It is unpleasant. I also wake up with powerful headaches due to hypoxia or oxygen deprivation.

More insidious are the effects of dreamlessness; at such times I do not get much REM sleep and my subsequent cognitive functions degrade. When it lasts too long I can hallucinate, i.e., have waking dreams, talking to someone in real life and someone else in my dream.

Even with the CPAP I do not sleep well. As long as I can stay active it is not too bad; I am prone to doze off if passive for too long, which only worsens as I age.

I rarely remember my dreams, and long before being diagnosed with apnea I resented having to sleep. My goals for any given day have always exceeded the time I have; I have been greedy that way since I was born. As I have been blessed with stamina enough to run long-distance when younger I have gotten away with doing more and sleeping less for most of my life.

I am sixty now, and it is harder and harder to get away with this each passing year. One of the things I hope to and need to do as I face the prospect of retiring in a decade is to make some accommodation with sleep, to want to do less with my waking hours. It is hard to change after all these years.


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