so the results from my sleep study are FINALLY in! & basically the answer is that i have something even milder than mild sleep apnea. it's something that lots of people have, where you stop breathing, slightly, more like a wee tiny bit of obstructed breathing, a couple of times during the night. it's so mild that they don't even routinely treat it with a CPAP machine, on occasion they'll suggest a dental device, but normally not even that.
however, because of the fact that i am looking at gastric bypass, the nurse at the specialty center needs to get in touch with the people at hcmc because occasionally the surgeons will want even the mildest cases of sleep apnea treated for about two months before surgery in order to have one less possible cardiac complication at the time of surgery. & so the optimistic estimate of january '07 may have been a bit premature since i now have the results of the sleep study.
& further more they want me to do this other "test" in which i wear some kind of a watch that measures my activity levels, and at the same time i need to keep a sleep log, to help them better figure out exactly why i've been so blasted tired lately. & i'll have to wear the watch & keep the log for 2-4 weeks, & it's going to be about 4 weeks before i actually get the stinkin watching thingie due to the fact that they are mondo expensive & the sleep clinic only has a couple of them.
actually, i think i need to call them back & see if i can leave a message for the nurse that i talked with today because i was in such a hurry to get out of there so i could get to work on time that i didn't clarify if she was going to call hcmc soon to find out about the CPAP, or if i was going to have to do the watch thing & THEN the CPAP, if needed, which would be absolutely ridiculous since that would be a few months wasted.
action plan? well, my bad self is going to take a lesson from my blog of a few days ago about persistence & call both HCMC & the specialty center today to get all of my follow up questions answered. i do also need to find out when i need to meet with the internal medicine doctor at HCMC & when i would be meeting with a surgeon & all of that jazz. & find out who needs to do my notification to medica, i want to make sure that all of my t's are crossed & i's dotted with smiley faces.
interestingly enough i was all philosophical & patient about this whole surgery thing, but now that it looks like it may be seriously delayed by something that is being reported to me as a very-mild-not-even-of-concern-because-it's-so-mild-sleep-not-even-actually-apnea. so, let's keep our fingers crossed that the surgeons at HCMC don't really want me to have a CPAP. or, if they do insist on me being on CPAP for two months, that i'll get that sooner rather than later & that i won't have to wait for the other acitography test & the stinkin watch that takes a month for me to be able to get.
the only bright spot in any of this is that the doctor's office scale reported me as weighing less than when i weighed in at the Y last week. but, it's not an official weight since it was done two days early at a non-official scale. yeah, it has to be all neat & tidy for purposes of the great pork off, aka farm people competition.
2 comments:
Just keep in mind that a lot of this has to do with you, and what you are requesting. You could certainly tell the sleep clinic to stick it and mind their own business if that was something you felt was right. In any case, don't let them get you caught up in red tape is the main thing, and do what you feel is right! Just my 7 cents..(it's gone up with inflation :)
Hiya sweetie - on my cpap machine it has a setting for folks like you with a mild obstruction. Only way to really really test it is to swallow a balloon type thing into your lung when they do the test. Thats what I had to do to see if it was any worse. I know you're itching to get the operation done but be well worth to make sure its ok as it is sleep apnea - just in a different form. My 3 & 1/2 euros ;-)
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