Under the heading of, “I have to tell you this story so I can tell you that one…”

As some of you know, I suffer from a medical condition called obstructive sleep apnea (there are other kinds, but for now I’ll shorten this to just apnea); it’s a throat condition where during sleep the throat collapses, blocking the flow of air. An apnea sufferer’s brain, feeling rightly that the body is trying to kill it, will awaken enough to take conscious control over that pesky breathing thing, to make sure it gets some oxygen. This happens over and over, all night long, to where an apnea patient doesn’t get much (if any) REM sleep. This means, after eight hours, the poor slob feels like they haven’t gotten any sleep at all…which they haven’t. Multiply this by days…weeks…well, let’s just say apnea patients are probably the least pleasant people on the face of the earth.

Ok, so the “cure” to this is to use a machine to pressurize the airway down the throat; the pressure creates an air “splint,” keeping the throat from collapsing, keeping the brain from thinking it’s being throttled, and thereby keeping the patient in dreamland. (I know the medical profession treats this as a sleep disorder, but it ain’t; it’s a throat disorder. It’s frustrating for us to have to deal with lectures on insomnia, when we have no trouble at all sleeping, it’s that whole breathing thing we can’t do properly.)

Back to that CPAP (stands for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, and we’ll ignore that my CPAP machine does not provide “Continuous Pressure,” by design) machine. Anyone who tells you they enjoy having some machine blow up their airway like a balloon is lying to you, but those of us with any sense suffer with the ill-fitting masks, the big tube running off our face into the machine, the “rain-out” of condensation on winter evenings, and all the other despised nonsense, because we kinda like being awake and alert at 2:00 in the afternoon. I mean, someone with a broken leg doesn’t like their cast, but they wear it so they can avoid having their foot on backwards, right?
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