Millions of men don't know they're suffering from sleep apnea. Consider this a wake-up call.
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For most of my adult life, I've been intermittently jolted awake by vivid hallucinations. My apparitions visit randomly and take various forms, ranging from a friendly colleague to a Lovecraftian horror. I once shook my wife awake to introduce her to the team of contractors who'd appeared at our bedside. "Babe, they're here to fix the floor tiles," I beamed. We don't have tiled floors.
Another night, I bolted out of bed to engage in hand-to-hand combat with a six-point elk that had materialized on the couch. After a short battle, I flipped on the overhead lights to get a better look at the beast. He vanished, and I regained full consciousness in my tighty-whities, shaking from adrenaline. Not my finest moment.
In my twenties, I saw my episodes as a (mostly) harmless quirk, akin to sleep walking. They didn't always keep me in my family's good graces, but I felt otherwise fine. I brushed them off for years.
In reality, my body was slowly torturing itself. A doctor later suggested that my hallucinations were the product of sleep deprivation, brought on by a severe case of sleep apnea. It's a disorder that causes you to stop breathing throughout the night, due either to an obstructed airway or faulty signals between your brain and your breathing muscles.
In my case, the tissue in my throat was relaxing during sleep and collapsing my airway. I'd stop breathing for five or ten seconds at a time, dozens of times per hour. My snoring was horrendous -- I've woken up house guests sleeping on different floors from me -- but the effects of sleep apnea were much worse for my brain and body. My blood wasn't getting enough oxygen to feed my vital organs, and my brain was waking up every few minutes, so I wasn't getting any of the reparative benefits of sleep. I lived without rest for more than 15 years. I didn't feel it in the early days (your body can endure a hell of a lot of torture in your twenties, it turns out) but I was deteriorating rapidly.
I'm 36 now, and over the last year or two, the consequences of sleep deprivation revealed themselves in the same way that a glass window reveals itself to a seagull. Fatigue hung over me constantly. Waking myself up became an hours-long ritual of energy drinks and coffee. I napped during my lunch breaks instead of exercising or walking the dog. I was irritable and unmotivated, I generally looked like hell, and menial tasks began to feel like insurmountable hurdles. Worst of all, my short-term memory faded, to the point where I was jotting notes after everyday conversations to remember names and basic details.
My wife, who bore the brunt of my transformation into a grumpy badger, was the first to suggest I get a sleep study. She'd done her research: Most of my issues were common symptoms of sleep apnea, and ignoring them could lead to a cascading series of health problems.