Learning to Live with CPAP Machine to Treat Sleep Apnea Not an Easy Adjustment
My grandfather snored like a walrus with a head cold. If you watched the exterior of that Pennsylvania farmhouse at night, you could see the roof rise and fall and the windows bulge outward with his nightly singing. You could do that because you would have nothing else to do in the dark, unless, like grandma, you were nearly deaf. The rest of us certainly wouldn’t be asleep when Pap was. Take it from a 9-year-old girl staring wide-eyed into the blackness of rural Pennsylvania and contemplating the ghostly number of ancestors who died in the stone house built in 1848. So perhaps Pappy is where I get this snoring thing. My grown daughter Eleanor has been haranguing me for several years to go be checked for sleep apnea, a condition in which a person snores and then stops breathing — hopefully temporarily, though not always I’m told. She claimed I would stop breathing for long stretches that made her nervous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just more unnecessary doctor visits. After all, the dog rarely complains and almost never howls in unison. And me? I’m asleep. How would I know what I’m doing? Several months ago, however, doctors investigating minor stomach trouble insisted that your local columnist undergo a quick test in which they knock you out and stick cameras down your throat to maraud around in the murky squishiness of what one might call the upper guts. One question they asked first: Have you ever been diagnosed with sleep apnea? No, I said, I haven’t. Just as I came to, coughing and choking, being wheeled on a gurney down a hall at Advent Health, the doctor demanded, “I thought you said you didn’t have sleep [...]