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Health & Anxiety

The Apnea Adventure Begins

By Steve

Been a quick process; after my regular doctor suggested that this was the next step in my seven-years-long medical odyssey, he made an appointment for me. I met with a sleep doctor this morning, they had an opening for a study for tonight, and he’ll see me and give me results first thing in the morning. That’s pretty amazingly fast.

Doc thinks it’ll turn out to be “fairly severe” apnea, but we’ll see. So very NOT looking forward to having an alien clamped to my face every night, but living like I’ve been living in my waking hours needs to come to an end.

The adrenal drama, after seven years, came to a close yesterday with an agreement that my adrenals are in stasis with existing drug treatment, that surgery will be indicated only if they go out of control again, and that imaging them every year or so and doing monthly obeisance to the pharmaceuticals for a couple of ‘scripts and we’re done. Seven years. Expenses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in three states. Hospitalizations. ER visits. And on and on and on and now we’re down to this. I’m more exhausted than when we started, so the apnea is, as I said, our next step in the process. So is losing 40 pounds, but that’s another story for another day.

Now the trick: Getting to sleep on a Tempurpedic away from home, four hours before my usual bedtime, without having one to three heavy beagles sleeping on me and without my nightly two-hour soak in the tub. Sigh.

Well, let’s get on with it …