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.