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New here - stanleyjack - 03-02-2023
Hello,
I have suspected I suffer from Sleep Apnea for years now (20-30). I had a sleep study around 8 years ago on the UK NHS, but I never slept on the night. I just felt pressured from knowing I needed to 'perform well'. So the result was all clear, no apnea.
While this was happening, my wife would often wake me up scared as I would stop breathing, or tell me to shut the fluff up as I was snoring like a fog horn. This is a pattern I follow often. I get really tired and sleep deprived until I collapse into a sleep one night and snore my head off.
Anyhow since back then, I dropped a lot of weight and made a lot of positive changes. I now run marathons on a fairly regular basis, I pretty much have stopped drinking and really cleaned up my diet. My wife has told me I no longer get stuck breathing, but I still have the odd snore session where she wakes me up and I go to sleep downstairs. When she wakes me up, I always think 'gah! I was not snoring!'. The other thing my poor wife has to put up with, is my jerking and kicking legs. I am asleep (or I think I am) and then my hold body jolts and I kick (I have kicked her in the leg before and she was highly P*ssed off). Is this also a symptom?
The thing is I still feel so tired a lot. I get really bad brain fog, which is not ideal as I am software engineer and my brain is my trade. I seem to have got around working with this, but occasionally I am on a conference call and need to speak, I stop to collect my thoughts and my head just feels numb and there is nothing there for me to translate into words, so I just umm and ermm and try to wing it. I also catch colds really easily, I don't know if this is related. I take a lot of vitamins (zinc / c etc) to try and resolve this and I still wear a mask when in public places, yet these bugs still get into me.
Convinced something is not right, I decided to look into testing myself. Now I understand this might be controversial, but I am getting desperate. After some research I bought a withlings sleep analyzer (they claim its an EU certified medical grade device), calibrated it and went to bed. Woke up the next morning after the normal ritual of getting up to pee 4 times and have that one hour block at 3am where I just feel tired by wired. I synced the app and looked at the results. Its graded me as having severe sleep apnea with an AHI of 31.
I kind feel good knowing that I know now. But I am also just dead keen to get this fixed now after being this way for far too many years.
I plan to go and see my GP, but I don't feel confident about this as I know the UK's NHS is hugely underfunded and running in the red now.
The thing is, I am doing OK, so I can afford to go private. Being a techy I honestly would be happy to buy my own machine and figure it out for myself (I am pretty good at number crunching, data science), but I know you need a prescription, so I have to play the game. I just really don't want to hang about.
Hopefully this fixes me up, and I don't have to keep trotting through life like the walking dead.