Sleeping with a machine

When my ex and I broke up one of the hardest parts of the break up was learning how to sleep alone again. The comfort of having a cuddle at night, every night for the best part of 30 years, is a strong hormonal buzz to lose.

 I put weight on, increasing from around 89kg to about 95Kg. And while I knew I snored a bit at 89kg, I know I snored a lot more at 95Kg. And some mornings would wake up feeling hung over. This was disconcerting as I'd stopped drinking in April 2013. There is a bloke I know in Sydney who had been using a CPAP machine around 2011 and he claimed that after he started using it that he had experienced an increase in his energy levels.

So earlier this year I went in search of a sleep physician. And found one in the form or Dr Adrian Chazan.  A sleep study was organized, with the advice being given that I should look at taking a taxi home as I was going to look a bit like a wired up suicide bomber.

For the night the study took place I thought that I had a reasonable nights sleep. And that I wasn't going to show a lot in the study. Well that was an incorrect assumption. I had an AHI average for the night of 17/hour. With peaks of 48/hour during REM sleep. Which basically means I was having hypopnea (or apnea but for me it was hypopnea). With a drop in Oxygen saturation in my blood from 96% to 93%. And I had been snoring.

Follow up time with Dr Chazan and initially I was looking at a mouth guard type of fitting for my mouth. But that was going to cost around $1800 and I may have had to go onto a CPAP machine anyway. So I ended up trying a CPAP machine and then purchasing a machine, with a total cost of trial and machine being around $1200. 

And now I've had the machine for a couple of months. Took a while to become adjusted to using it, but I am finding that I'm falling asleep quite easily and staying asleep quite easily.

After my first month of use I went back to CPAP Australia to have the data that is saved by the machine reviewed. And the pattern of my breathing for the week or so prior to my review showed I had been breathing in a pattern called "Cheynes-Stokes" breathing. However, that period also co-incided with my sitting a Vipassana meditation course. And I was consciously trying to meditate as much as possible, including when I was lying in bed at night while trying to sleep. I had been conscious of the machine trying to force me to breath when I wasn't ready to breath during some of those nights.

The pattern was of a little concern to the guy doing a review so I'm off for another review next week to see whether that pattern still holds when I'm not on a meditation course.

Overall I believe the cost of getting a machine to improve my sleep experience has been well worth while. An added bonus is that it will decrease the chances that I will snore. But not eliminate the chance of snoring. The machine is a fixed pressure machine, which means if I get a respiratory infection, my chance of snoring increases. If I had a variable pressure auto-adjusting machine, my chance of snoring would decrease dramatically.

One of the side benefits of having moved to Melbourne is that I am doing a lot more walking and eating less most days. With the result that I have lost somewhere between 8 to 10 Kg over the past 6 months. I have measured my weight at my last AirBnB and the results were between 85Kg to 87Kg. Weights I haven't seen for about 6 or 7 years.