Keeping up with Current Trends

If there’s any doubt that I am a with-it sort of guy, I submit that last night I slept with a CPAP mask on my face. I know what you’re thinking. No I don’t really but I like the phrase.

It turns out that two of my younger siblings--Cindy and Jimmy--have been sleeping with these machines for years now for treatment of sleep apnea. My brother specifically was having episodes of the arrhythmia called afib, which I had back in the summer, after my ICD was installed. I didn’t want to get afib again. The doctors conk me out and use my ICD to jump start my heart. Traumatic, but not particularly serious. The doctors look at it as a boat payment, and I can hardly blame them. Anyway, as I came out of the anesthetic I promised I’d look into what it would take to avoid the reappearance of afib, and I was pretty surprised when my brother, who is usually talkative about his health challenges, had withheld this condition and its treatment. His doctor suggested a sleep study that might determine if apnea was causing his afib. And it looks like it was.

Being the slave to fashion that I am, once I knew that Jimmy had solved a problem I was having with a sleep study (and Cindy too, although she wasn’t specifically having arrhythmia) I decided to talk to my cardiologist about a sleep study.

Hold on a minute here and ask yourself how things have come to the point that I type “my cardiologist” like he was a personal attachment, like “my Corgi mix” or “My Opperman piccolo.” Well, money is a wonderful thing, and, through our insurance, we have been shoveling quite a lot of it his way, so I’ll ask your pardon if I feel a little bit of ownership. He’s quite a nice guy with a very dark sense of humor, actually.

So he set up a sleep study on one of the night that McCain and Obama had their first debate. In due time, they sent the results to my cardiologist (there it is again), and determined that I was having 39 episodes of blockage resulting in lack of oxygen per hour.

They requested another sleep study to fit me with a machine, and in due time it was done. Finally they contacted my cardiologist’s office and I went in for a fitting yesterday.

I’ve been following blogs and other web pages about personal experiences with CPAP, and I am looking forward to feeling the wonderous effects of this machine. But I’ve only slept with it one night, and I spent most of that night waiting for the wonderous effects to fall on me and wrestling with the mask. I had fun terrifying my dogs and my spouse who made the mistake of falling asleep on the couch while I was experimenting with fit.

What I’m hoping is I’ll have some extra energy to undertake the task of putting the band back together. That’ll be worth the effort.