Sleep Is a Battlefield

 Day 5.

But first, Day 4.... I didn't use the machine at all. I'd reached the point where sleep of any quality was the most important thing. So I ditched the machine. That was the right move. It gave my lungs more of a break and let me catch up.

Day 5 I went back to the machine. 

It seemed fine. I thought it went better. But this morning I have a productive asthma hack and my lungs feel boggy. I'm not sure what's going on.

This isn't supposed to be possible. (Although let the record show CPAP/APAPs ARE associated with respiratory and sinus infections. They are definitely lung irritants. We're just not recognizing non infection irritation yet.)

Sooooo. What do? I got no clue.

Probably time to email the pulm.

To be frank, since my body is being so whacky, experience shows this means we're missing something. Like, the home sleep studies are only 72% accurate. They have a significant error rate. And they don't collect as much data as formal sleep studies. It might behoove us all to do a real in-lab sleep study.

It's just a question of how much time we spend on pretending it's my 'weight*' or that it's not happening at all because it doesn't exist in the literature (which always grants an unlimited license to ignore the patient in my experience).

And if the goal was to give me a complex about sleep. I'm there. The machine is a great way to make sleep as angsty as a teen love triangle. 

Everyone says Pillow is abusive, but they don't know him like I do. Do I suck face with Machine, the stud everyone says is the hero except he's actually trying to kill me? Or stick with Pillow, the one everyone assumes is the villain? Who do I love more? Do my friends really see something about Pillow that I don't? Should I be concerned? Aaaaaaaah.

And, lastly, here's an informal patient survey about sleep apnea after covid. The apnea covid connection doesn't have a lot of medical literature on it yet, but there's a clear pattern in patient reports. You could see how covid caused type 2 diabetes in a similar pattern long before the studies confirmed that. Like, it's a thing. Hopefully science catches up soon...

*Reminder: Not morbidly obese. Pudgy maybe, but much closer to normal weight than not at this point.