Sleep Apnea--comments?

[learnteach]

Sleep apnea--last night, the third person in recent times asked me if I had gone and checked for sleep apnea.  Sigh.  Time to stop being a martyr and go fight the system to see a doctor.  Of course, the fact that I'm waking up several times a night to urinate (when I don't need to urinate as much during the day), the spells of sleepyness and irritability (which I attribute to school based depression) and the excess weight I have and lack of exercise, combined with the fact that one of my brothers has a CPAP for his apnea...hmm.

Any help/notes any of my friends can give me?

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

We've been through the apnea thing.

Yes, being overweight is definitely a factor in it, but you knew that.

My-John was waking up, just slighly, several times a minute, before the CPAP. (Which, btw, costs around $5K so you'll need a medical plan which covers durable medical equipment.)

When you're asleep, there's a hormone which suppresses urine production. Forget what it's called, but it's something really obvious. However, if you've got apnea, you're awake a lot, and maybe the hormone doesn't go into effect, so you need to pee as if you were awake.

Apnea of course contributes to sleepiness. Lack of sleep can make you irritable and clinically depressed. And of course it makes thinking harder, which makes life harder in general, even if you're not depressed.