So, I have scheduled a consult with my family dr. to get a referral for a sleep study, to see if I have sleep apnea. Anybody else been through this before? How bad is using a cpap machine? Are the benefits really that noticeable? How much of a pain, is the sleep study? Any advice/council would be much appreciated!
My doctor wanted to schedule one for me and I refused because I knew there was no way with my schedule that I'd ever get to sleep. I don't go to bed usually until about 3:30 a.m. What sleep study is going to start at that time? It would be useless for me to try to sleep before that time because I wouldn't be tired and combine that with being in a strange place and knowing strange people are watching me ... no way I'm getting to sleep.
And the reason he wanted to schedule one? I told him I needed something to take at night because a pain in my hip is always waking me up every few hours. I start out fine, no pain, but the longer I lay there, the more likely is that the pain will come and it eventually gets bad enough to wake me up. Usually, the pain doesn't begin until I've lain there for a few hours, but it has been known to come before I can even fall asleep, but that is rare. He can't find any pain meds or sleep aids he's comfortable giving me, other than some useless anti-inflamatories that I eventually had to quit taking because they were raising my blood pressure and he replaced them with ... nothing, nada, zip.
It is a rare night when I don't wake up at least twice with hip pain. And if you combine that with having to go to the bathroom 2 and three times a night, I rarely get uninterrupted sleep. Last night, it was a stuffy nose that kept me waking up. I can't sleep breathing through my mouth. I got up two or three times because of it and went to the bathroom those times as well, so at least I didn't get woke up for that later on. I finally got my nose cleared at about 8 this morning and had four hours of uninterrupted sleep after that, which is a luxury I rarely have.