I went to my appointment at the sleep center and met with a PA. On a side note, my experiences with PAs have been extraordinarily positive. I’m not looking to generalize. In my experience I have found that PAs seem to be much less rushed. Your mileage, of course, might vary.

We talked about how chronic sinusitis and sleep apnea sort of overlap. I’ve indeed got the double whammy: sinusitis and apnea. Great! Is there hope for me? I think so…

She also relayed to me in great detail about what my sleep study results showed.

I was, in some cases, stopping breathing over 50 times an hour. During one hour, I actually stopped breathing 71 times! (With sleep apnea, you often don’t fully wake-up when this process is playing out.)

So, when you just think about this from a commonsense type of perspective: sleep is our restorative time. The body is doing all sorts of stuff and, in some ways, repairing and fortifying itself. It simply stands to reason that if you have sleep apnea and are waking up 50 times an hour…well, it stands to reason that your body is not efficiently repairing and fortifying itself! It’s getting disrupted too frequently!

So, the PA said she’ll have a CPAP machine for me within a week.

I said, “Are you sure you can get this approved? They turned down the request from my general doctor.”

“100% I can get it for you. They’ll call you. Then you come in and they show you how to use it. Then, after you use it for a few weeks, you come in for an overnight study and they gather the data and then fine-tune the settings.”

I’m pretty sure I got the last part right…that’s about how I remember it, but I’ll update this when they get me the machine and I ask how the fine-tuning process works to verify this info.

One thing that the PA said that blew my mind was that sleep apnea is putting you in a constant “fight or flight” mode. I didn’t know that. And, that connects with frequent urination at night.

This link has a lot of good info including the quoted sections below:

“The stress of abnormal breathing during episodes of apneas and hypopneas leads to activation of the sympathetic nervous system and the “fight or flight response”. Heart rate and blood pressure will increase. Untreated OSA also results in increased levels of catecholamines and of cortisol, hormones that are released in response to stress…Patients may also complain of headaches upon
awakening, frequent nighttime urination, nocturnal sweating, nocturnal heartburn and irritability.”

Ultimately, I’m very damn happy to finally be getting a CPAP machine! That would be a huge bonus if it got this damn irritating nighttime peeing straightened out!