Sleeping Dancing with Death

Every night when I fell asleep I danced with Death! Every time I dozed off or took a nap, I danced with Death. I have Severe Obstructive Sleep Apnea. I stop breathing in my sleep over one hundred times an hour. There was the distinct possibility that I could have died innumerable times in my sleep. The condition is incurable, at least in my case. But there is effective treatment. My Sleep Apnea Specialist has prescribed the CPAP machine for whenever I sleep. Using this wonderful machine has saved my life. I can sleep now without fearing that I will stop breathing!

How did I come to this - relying on a machine to literally keep me alive while I sleep? The story begins in my childhood in a sandbox.

Another child took my metal toy shovel and I demanded it back. He gave it back all right and severed my nose with it. The family doctor sewed it back on but it was to trouble me for the rest of my life. By the time I was in my fifties, I had had three operations on it to clean it up inside so I could breath. That, combined with heavy drinking until I was forty, did a number on my throat. As I grew up, I developed a reputation as a prolific snorer. Family members claimed that I rattled the glass panes in the windows. They even taped me one night to prove it to me. Well life goes on and I kept on snoring loudly.

It was my second wife, Maureen, who alerted me to how bad my snoring and breathing was getting. She became worried when I progressed from snoring to gagging and gasping for breath in my sleep. I developed a bad case of heartburn and had to make frequent trips to the bathroom. My health deteriorated, as I was not getting enough sleep. While stopped at red lights I would fall asleep at the wheel of my car, only to wake up in seconds gasping for breath. At work I would doze off at my desk with the same results. I became chronically tired and cranky. In short I was a mess. My life was falling apart.

Maureen came to my rescue. Having heard of Sleep Apnea, she researched it on the Internet. There she found a checklist of symptoms. I had them all! Time to see the Doctor!

Within a short while, I was at the University of British Columbia Hospital Sleep Lab. They wired me up and told me to go to sleep. Right! With all those wires attached to me? Surprisingly I did fall asleep but after two hours they woke me and said that I definitely had Sleep Apnea. In that two hours I had over one hundred apnea episodes. I had stopped breathing more than once every minute. Of course I did not realize it as I would start to wake up when my breathing stopped and start to breathe again, fall back to sleep, stop breathing, start to gag, wake up, start to breathe and so on. No wonder I was tired all the time!

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