The Sleep Study Centre...

Last Wednesday I stayed in the Snore Australia centre at Greenslopes Hospital. I checked in at 7pm and was shown to my room for the night, by Mark, the technician on duty that night.

My bed...

Behind the door is my ensuite...

The TV, above which is a camera...

The microphone...

More monitoring equipment beside the bed...

After an hour of pottering around in my room, (I crocheted), Mark then took me to another room where he attached leads to my legs, abdomen, chest and lots of leads were attached to my head. Then it was back to my room where the leads were attached to the piece of monitoring equipment on the right hand side of the photo above. And then it was time for me to lie down in the bed and go to sleep. 

It took a bit longer than normal to get to sleep, and I woke a few times during the night when Mark came in...obviously an alarm triggered at his post when a lead kept coming loose for some reason. 

Then at 5.15 am, the lights came on and the leads were all removed. They had taken over half an hour to attach but very little time to take them off! I showered, dressed  and had breakfast and then waited around until 8.30 when I had an appointment with one of the specialist doctors, who would give me the sleep study results. 

Apparently I didn't snore loudly during the night...just a soft snuffling sort of noise. But Dr P showed me the various graphs of readings taken in the night which showed that I have severe sleep apnea. I actually had more episodes of stopping breathing that DH, but for shorter periods. DH stopped breathing for anything up to 58 seconds, but the longest interval for me was only 30 seconds. As my late mother was fond of saying, 'You could have knocked me over with a feather' when Dr P told me the results. I have had high blood pressure since I was 17... Tests had never identified why. Dr P said there was a high probability that sleep apnea was involved. After all this time he warned that treatment now probably can't reverse that condition. But hey! If I'm lucky it might make a difference to the level of medication. 

So...for 4 weeks I'm hiring and using one of these...a CPAP machine...

Hers...

And on the other side of the bed...

His...

But my mask just fits over the nose area...not a full face mask like DH's.

'My' machine is whisper quiet. I'm slowly getting used to it and can feel how it makes me breathe more deeply. I have been waking up a lot clearer headed. The machines have SD cards in them so DR P can see all the data at the end of the trial period.  (I can check the night's data in the morning by using the menu on the little screen) So hopefully when I see him in 4 weeks' time, there will be improvements in the quality of my sleeping and a lessening of the apnea episodes.