Freaking weekend

Been an interesting one. But I did get to learn something ... I like morphine. Maybe not a good thing to say but when you are in the hospital and in as much pain as I was in Saturday morning, the nurse comes in and says the doctor said I could give you some morphine. I just lay there and say "that is nice as long as it will" ... (she now has the syringe shooting it in my IV) ... "make me lose the pain .. how long does it take for this to work? I feel warm inside. You are nice." Nurse Jessie, "have you never had morphine before?" Me, "I don't think I ever had ... is this a silly smile on my face." Nurse Chris came in to tell me I have to drink half of the barium solution now and the other half in 30 minutes. Asks me my name ... I say, "I am loopy." He is like, "huh?" Nurse Jesse, "First time on morphine."

Finally at 7 am I get some sleep to be woken up in 30 minutes for the other half of the solution. To be woken up again to get rolled into the CT scan of my abdomen. Finally my favorite doctor (remembered me from a year ago in ER room number 2 - heart incident on March 5, 2009 - go back the to the first postings in this blog) came in to confirm what he had already told me he suspected. Gall bladder. Given drugs (a strength of Vicodin I did not even know existed) and stuff for the stomach and nausea. So crawled to the pharmacy, got meds, crawled home and then took the pain pill. That was pretty much it for Saturday.

On top of that I think I have a sinus infection and have been around too many people with strep this week so first order of business tomorrow is to get an appointment with my doctor. Get him to get the ultrasound and CT scan from the hospital and see where he wants to go with that. Hopefully convince him that I need something to kick this infection and then get on with this week.

All this after I was promoted to IT System Support Manager last Sunday and it was finally made official to my team on Friday (my day off). So it was truly a whirlwind week. I think I will be popping a pain pill here in a few short moments that will cast my into oblivion for a few hours. But some of you will hear about this through others on the coconut wireless so I figured I would lay it all out now.

So here is to a less eventful week ahead. That and a longer Christmas break as I am now truly a member of corporate America with the schedule that coincides with the home office. Wow first true M-F 8-5 job ever.

Peace to all.

Almost the whole night

11 something to 5:30 with the mask on. Last 30 minutes of sleep before getting up and coming to work I took the mask off - still not sure why but I did.

Getting there.

I set my ramp up time on the machine to 45 minutes last night and that seemed to help. I have noticed that if I get in bed and listen to a couple of songs, watch a short podcast or read a couple of pages and distract myself the rhythm of my breathing is not in competition with the fact that I have this contraption on my head.

Getting better

Last night I made it from 11:30 to 4:30 with the mask on. An improvement I say.

Slowly but surely getting used to this. It still freaks me out when the pressures get higher and attempt to control my breathing and I am not asleep yet. That causes mental panic and breathing patterns that fight the process.

But I am learning and attempting to live!!!!

Slight frustration

It seems that severe sinus infections/colds/walking pneumonia affect more than just the ability to communicate, be understood and not feel like collapsing while at work. Yep it seems that these annoying happenstances interfere with someone who has a new machine that they supposed to use in order to sleep well.

Two nights ago it was the start it up, lay down, 10 minutes later the constant air flow was drying the throat out and starting a coughing fit. Get that under control. Try again. After a couple of hours that was enough.

Last night was better but only lasted for about 2 hours before I woke up coughing and choking and said to heck with it. I was going to put it back on when I calmed down but then woke up a few hours later and it was still not on...oops.

I see a learning curve here. But that is alright. Keep taking my meds and get this little nasty crud under control and then maybe I can see what a better nights sleep is all about. :)

CPAP/BLPAP

Patient has severe obstructive sleep apnea syndrome, with an apnea/hypopnea index of 69.5 events/hour.

Raw data was reviewed and this was the interpretation:

• Total Sleep time was 284 minutes (4.7 hours)
• Sleep onset took 62.5 minutes
• REM onset was at 50 minutes (classified as early and attributed to initiation of CPAP and profound sleep deprivation)
• Sleep was fragmented with 65 arousals and awakenings of which 38 were due to spontaneous factors
• Sleep efficiency was 76.7%

• BP 110/72 pretest and posttest was 106/70
• BLPAP settings start at 8.0/4.0 and all levels were tested while patient was asleep
• Review of all data shows 12.0/8.0 offers the best control of respiratory events, snoring and improvement in sleep architecture
• Reduction in sleep apnea/hypopnea was from 69.5 events/hour to 2.2 events/hour

In other words it worked in the testing environment now I get to try this at home.

Sleep is necessary

So here is what that is all about. That picture of the man with all the wires coming out of his head.

The hooked me up with the cpap last night that applies a constant pressure through the nose and forces the throat to stay open. What happens in sleep apnea (for all those who may not be aware) is when we sleep everything relaxes. That is why sleep is good. But too much relaxation is bad. Where? In the throat. You see as we sleep the tongue falls back a little, the muscles of the throat relax and, in some of us, this closes off the opening where air travels to our lungs.

YIKES!

But our body realizes, in me up to a minute and a half later, that it needs to get air and wakes us up and the process starts over again. Although it is not a wake up that usually brings us to full awareness thus we super quickly fall back into the same cycle (like seconds) and it starts again.

With the constant air pressure we force the throat to stay open. Thus it cannot close, we sleep like lots of people in the world do and it is more fulfilling.

Sheena, my nurse, told me it took about 30 minutes to fall asleep. It did not take the 200 minutes to hit rem and I went into it more than once (usually takes someone around 90 minutes to hit rem sleep).

Now all the data of when I was asleep, she tried different pressures to see what was the best, is given to the doc and he see which one was the best. They schedule a tech to come out and set this up at my house in a couple of weeks and we go from there.

But I will have to say my nose hurt this morning. Then she informed me, in her little blond girl southern twang, that it was "cos we do it so tight here so that it does not interfere with the wires. When you get it home you can fit it looser and not have it scrunching your nose up." Good because I woke up at 5 about to choke to death.

Resistance - I think not

No there is no picture with the Darth Vader mask...but I am sure that there will be one eventually! :)