Sleep Apnea, NIH
It’s true. You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
Or in my case, almost gone.
The short story is that two weeks ago, I checked into a sleep disorder clinic. That night, I was horizontal 481 minutes and “slept” 427 minutes. However, during my seven hours of “sleep,” I had 337 total “arousals,” the bulk of them respiratory. That’s 48 arousals per hour, almost one a minute. During REM, it was more than one a minute. (An arousal is a 3-5 second unconscious awakening.)
I thought sleep apnea was something rare, something that happened to other people. I thought snoring was normal. I was wrong.
