I'm one of those men who over the years has constantly dismissed my wife's complaints about snoring and sleep apnea, chalking it up to her being a light sleeper and probably not really all that bad. However my kids started complaining about 'hearing Dad snore' and their rooms were down the hall, and I caught snippets of them asking their mother 'how can you stand that?'. I read up on Sleep Apnea and realized I probably did have it, and that I woke up - A LOT - at night. But, I'm a busy guy and in typical male fashion the last thing I wanted to do was pack up my pajamas and go spend a night in a sleep lab where someone observes me sleeping- that was just ridiculous. As the years piled up, my wife commented more and more about it, finally telling me it kept her up all night as I would stop breathing so many times, every single night. I realized I woke up tired every morning, and would get very sleepy at the store some afternoons - so eventually I raised the white flag of surrender to the wife's naggin....err....ahhh...comments about it and told my doctor I was ready to be tested for it and seek some kind of treatment if necessary. I'd seen those CPAP machines/masks and damn if I'm going to be hooked up to one of those gizmos though - maybe just a mouthguard device that re-positions your lower jaw, that I could do.

So my first surprise was that you don't go to a sleep lab any more. They hook you up with a electronic device that looks like a Google watch that you wear to bed, two electrodes for your fingers and one you place on your throat, and you sleep in your own bed. That was a major bonus, so I happily took the test. A couple of days later the results came back and I had not mild, not moderate, but SEVERE sleep apnea with thirty events every hour throughout the night (an event is where you cease breathing and your airway closes off, then your brain wakes you up to keep you from suffocating). That was every two minutes! No wonder my wife can't sleep at night and I felt so un-rested each day.

The Doc sends me to the Specialist, and they laugh at me when I suggest a simple mouthguard device and tell me I'm going right onto the CPAP machine immediately. Cripes, that thing makes me look like Bane in 'The Dark Knight Rises', but I'll give it a try, tubing and all. So I do, and I was amazed - shocked - at the results. It was far less invasive and troublesome than I had imagined. And it worked. The ResMed brand machine is ultra quiet, and the machine knows how much pressure to give to you to keep your airway from closing off while you sleep. I've been on it a week now, and can't believe the difference. My wife says the snoring and sudden starts are 98% gone now and I feel much better and no longer sleepy during the day. The CPAP machine even has a hard drive in it and continues to record events as you sleep. I went from approximately 200 episodes a night to just 2, a 99% improvement. And I'm told that will go down to 1 or even zero shortly.

So why am I sharing this? Because I know there must be folks on this forum that have spouses with sleep apnea and have not gone for treatment. So show this to your husband - (or your wife!) if they snore all night and sometimes stop breathing. It's no nearly as big a deal as they think it might be to get diagnosed and put on a treatment protocol. The CPAP thing really works, and its not that invasive, and they can say goodbye to restless sleep caused by heavy snoring and apnea. It's a walk in the park to do the test and wear the machine. Do it.