(12-13-2013, 06:57 AM)wilder Wrote: When I tried to exhale with all my might, I could feel something sliding out of my throat (although at the time, I thought it was sliding from the windpipe).
I did that during my sleep study. The tech said many apneas can occur during the exhale. I don't buy it. I think they occur right after the exhale. You can't have an apnea if you're exhaling, because if you're exhaling you're breathing, and if you're breathing you're not, by definition, having an apnea. I suppose you could be having an hypopnea, though.
After the exhale the airway either remains partially collapsed or collapses completely, then you can't inhale, which causes you to wake up just enough to breathe. And the cycle repeats itself. As an example, with an AHI of 23, sleeping 8 hours a night, that'll happen 184 times a night. Multiply that by 365 days per year times 20 years (a couple of decades of OSA) and you've done it over 1.3 million times!
Then you get a CPAP machine and you have to learn how to sleep all over again because during those 20 years you subconsciously learned to tolerate all that.
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