Now, at last, we got some results. Unlike the doctor who saw Norman only for short office visits, the nurse saw him in his home environment and realized just how frequently he dozed off and just how debilitating the sleep problem was. She put him on oxygen, and that helped a little, but not nearly enough.
SLEEP APNEA
The sleepy spells were rapidly become more frequent, the sleep deeper. Afraid he might slip away into a coma, I begged the nurse to do something. Despite the long waiting list, she managed to get him admitted to the Sleep Lab of a major hospital. There he was diagnosed as a victim of sleep apnea. I had never heard of sleep apnea, and was shocked to discover the condition is fairly common, although some sufferers are more seriously afflicted than others.There are three types of sleep apnea -- obstructive, central and mixed. Obstructive sleep apnea is by far the most common. One cause is an obstruction of the airway when the muscles of the tongue or uvula relax. In my husband's case, obesity and an abnormal amount of fat in the throat area caused the problem.
Unfortunately, Norman also suffered from central apnea. Central apnea is caused by the temporary cessation of the message from the brain that tells the diaphragm to breathe. When a person suffers from a combination of obstructive and central apnea, it's called mixed sleep apnea, and is by far the most difficult to treat and control.
In sleep apnea, with each period of breathlessness (as many as twenty in an hour) the carbon dioxide level in the blood rises and there is a corresponding decrease in the blood oxygen levels . This, along with the stress and the struggle to draw breath, puts a strain on the heart. Although with his obesity and alcohol problem, my husband was already a good candidate for a heart attack, the added stress of the sleep apnea amplified the problem. If the sleep apnea had been diagnosed sooner, the heart attack might have been avoided, or at least the damage it caused might have been reduced.
