251–260 of 370 posts
This is quite raw and I'm actually somewhat afraid to share this. But I think sleep apnea is criminally under-discussed and underdiagnosed. It can f your life up sideways and can take years to diagnose. So sharing my story and hope I can advocate for it. If you have sleep apnea, no amount of sleep gadgets, good habits, exercise, will help you. You must fix the root cause
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It's definitely not too late for you mate, no matter how it feels in the short term. You're putting it off because deep down your subconscious still knows that you are important and have innate value. When things are dark it's easy to forget it but the world needs you, people you know need you and love you. I suspect it's a trick of the mind that hides that from us temporarily. Anything you do will help and it will g…
I'm not a person who went from high functioning to struggling. I'm a person who went from no longer able to attend high school to ten years of being trapped at home by progressively debilitating fatigue. I've tried hundreds of things over the years, but it's like playing whack-a-mole or trying to slay the mythical hydra. For every improvement I manage, I fail two. No matter what I do, it isn't enough. I can barely ta…
Currently dealing with severe sleep apnea & the near inability to breathe thru my nose as a younger, athletic in a past life, skinny & thin framed male. Unable to get started w/CPAP due to life instability, & even that isn’t going to fully fix things as I have to have other major surgery that involves surgically removing my completely wrecked scalenes (anterior & middle - scalenes are secondary breathing muscles), a…
To their credit, they have a 1 year return policy. It's going back and now I have to do tons of research (apparently I didn't do enough the first time) to get a mattress that won't make my family sick.
Thank you for sharing this. I had no idea about this issue and would not have known to google about it otherwise.
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This, definitely this. Though apneas aren’t a component, I have a severe neurological sleep disorder that went undiagnosed largely due to physicians not ordering a sleep study. Even a sleep generalist I saw favored assuming psychological insomnia and regurgitated behavioral advice like no screens before bed and asked if I tried melatonin. As my sleep debt piled up and my sanity diminished each day, I threw my hands i…
Can you say more about the diagnosis and the treatment? I've had severe primary insomnia my entire life that appears to be getting worse with age and I rather rationally wonder for how much longer life will be worth living.
Basically with my disorder (Periodic Limb Movement Disorder or PLMD) it's categorized by episodes of 100s of rhythmic body movements which will sometimes wake me up, but even if they don't I wake up very tired from the movements.
The current treatment has been nightly diazepam (aka valium). The first-line medication for PLMD in the US is actually a dopamine agonist called Mirapex that is often used to treat parkinson's disease. The American Scholar published a piece about Mirapex in September titled "The Degradation Drug," [https://theamericanscholar.org/the-degradation-drug/] It's a medication known to cause dramatic personality changes and life altering compulsions like gambling and even child pornography. Evidence of efficacy for this specific condition is so thin it absolutely blows my mind this medication is handed out thoughtlessly (they really just want to delay prescribing a heavy sedative), I've told my neurologist I will never touch a dopamine agonist again and caution others to do plenty of reading before going on one
This is quite raw and I'm actually somewhat afraid to share this. But I think sleep apnea is criminally under-discussed and underdiagnosed. It can f your life up sideways and can take years to diagnose. So sharing my story and hope I can advocate for it. If you have sleep apnea, no amount of sleep gadgets, good habits, exercise, will help you. You must fix the root cause
[I don't agree that sleep gadgets of one variety or another don't help. CPAP, mandibular advancement devices... they absolutely do help. No treatment is perfect or 100% reliable always. But they help.
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Interesting. I bet close to all young skinny people with sleep apnea must remain undiagnosed. My generalist doc basically said "if you really insist we can do a polysomnography, but I'm pretty sure you don't have it, you're young, skinny and sporty. There isn't really much that helps that you can do about it anyway". I did insist and it turned out that I do have it. The changes in life I experienced are similar to yo…
The intensity of my sleep apnea varies from night to night, and you might be similar? Based on oxygen levels, mine also varies from subclinial to "medium" apnea. I was deemed not to have sleep apnea based on the take-home test or the in-hospital test... but I wore my oxygen-logging ring during the in-hospital test to check it was calibrated to the hospital's equipment (it was), and the specialist then diagnosed me ba…
And while we're on the subject, AHI is also pretty terrible. You could have an AHI of say, 5, which means "you don't have sleep apnea", but if you're sleeping 8 hours and these events only occur during the 2 hours of REM, then you've got an AHI of 20 during REM sleep, which will still wreck you.
This is quite raw and I'm actually somewhat afraid to share this. But I think sleep apnea is criminally under-discussed and underdiagnosed. It can f your life up sideways and can take years to diagnose. So sharing my story and hope I can advocate for it. If you have sleep apnea, no amount of sleep gadgets, good habits, exercise, will help you. You must fix the root cause
> If you have sleep apnea, no amount of sleep gadgets, good habits, exercise, will help you Probably not what you mean, but this is untrue as there can be different causes for sleep apnea. For instance obesity, which would be helped by exercise.
There's long been a stigma that only fat people have sleep apnea, which is not only false, but it is virtually impossible to lose weight when you have untreated sleep apnea. Meaning that people with sleep apnea are likely to get fat. And even with CPAP, which will greatly improve sleep apnea, you might still end up with UARS which will still make it impossible to lose weight.
Fact of the matter is, we don't know what causes sleep apnea in most people. It is certainly true that excess weight (especially on the chest and neck) can worsen or even cause sleep apnea in some people, but there are plenty of fat folks who don't get apneas. While there are also plenty of skinny folks whose airways collapse in their sleep.
This is quite raw and I'm actually somewhat afraid to share this. But I think sleep apnea is criminally under-discussed and underdiagnosed. It can f your life up sideways and can take years to diagnose. So sharing my story and hope I can advocate for it. If you have sleep apnea, no amount of sleep gadgets, good habits, exercise, will help you. You must fix the root cause
Interesting. I bet close to all young skinny people with sleep apnea must remain undiagnosed. My generalist doc basically said "if you really insist we can do a polysomnography, but I'm pretty sure you don't have it, you're young, skinny and sporty. There isn't really much that helps that you can do about it anyway". I did insist and it turned out that I do have it. The changes in life I experienced are similar to yo…
The months turned into years, and in my mid 30s, my upstairs neighbour complained about my loud snoring. Back to tests, another sleep study. Diagnosis: sleep apnea. They then asked me why I never got treatment in the first place, because apparently that first sleep study indicated sleep apnea ... but because the AHI was on the lower end, and because I was young and skinny, the doctor didn't think it was relevant for me to know.
Sigh.
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This makes me really sad to read. I really hope you don't do that. I can't imagine how hard this must have been for you. I sometimes feel like life is to much. What helps me is the realization that life right now is hard but I am enduring. What makes it feel to much is the feeling that this burden is going to go on forever. So I try to be satisfied with the fact that I am capable of handling life right now, and the f…
It makes me sad too, but it just is what it is. I've had individual days of the sun shining through the clouds, but in the end, the trajectory of my life is always downwards. It doesn't matter what I tried. I don't have enough executive function to stick to it. For every win, I fail two other things. It's a thankless, Sisyphean struggle just to survive from one day to the next. I wish I could catch a break, but my ot…
I experienced similar symptoms with eating anything causing extreme day long fatigue. This was a problem for me for over a several month period. It started as diarrhea when eating my typical diet of seemingly healthy foods. Then it progressed to eating very little and getting exhaustion from eating even when diarrhea wasn't triggered. I reasoned that I probably had IBS, and worked on figuring out what foods trigger it. For me I found it was the following: milk products, high fat products, animal fat, any meat except low fat chicken and fish, high fiber vegetables, high fiber grains, high FODMAP food such as fruits. Eventually I settled on a diet that cuts out all of my IBS triggers and I feel much better.
Another major trigger is meal frequency and size. If I eat too much at one time I suffer from IBS and exhaustion. I suspect that this may also be a factor for you. So I suggest eating small meals many times throughout the day. This helped me tremendously as well.
Lastly, medication was very effective in managing the issue as well. Imodium and peptobismol can be used in combination pretty frequently. This slows down your digestion and reduces gut inflammation, which I hypothesize is what causes the extreme exhaustion symptom. You can also see a doctor for IBS and they can prescribe you other medication that has a similar function but is perhaps stronger such a viberzi, though Imodium and peptobismol worked well enough for me. When I want to experience a cake or something outside my diet, I take all this medicine preemptively, including lactase if having dairy, and eat a small amount of it, and make sure not to do that too often.
I don't know if any of this will actually apply to your situation, but regardless I sincerely hope you find a solution as I did. I certainly understand how poor health is one of the hardest things to deal with emotionally.