Headaches associated with sleep apnea, in most cases, are your brain’s way of saying we are choking to death, “Wake the hell up!” Oh, the joy of sleep apnea, right? Your heart and your lungs recycle the CO2, and it builds up in your bloodstream, binding to things like…your brain. But with apnea, no oxygen in means no CO2 out.
Your body burns it up and the byproduct CO2, in all its glory, expires into the world, bad breath and all. With normal breathing, you take oxygen in. Without blood flow, you’d be, well…uh, dead. By functioning, I mean push vital blood throughout your system. When holding your breath, your heart and lungs keep functioning. Sleep apnea is the process of holding your breath. But when you’re asleep and suffer from sleep apnea, you’re a terrible conduit for exchanging gases. It’s what your body is good at when you’re awake. What’s that you say? Expire CO2? Yes, CO2. Problem is most patients never learn the byproduct of not getting oxygen is the fact you don’t expire CO2. It’s partly why some sleep apnea patients are notorious for having headaches. When your breathing stops, oxygen doesn’t come into your lungs. The worse you are, the longer you don’t breathe. If you have sleep apnea, you hold your breath at night. But did you know sleep apnea has definitive links to cancer? Most sleep apnea patients don’t realize this. “You suffer from sleep apnea,” is not as hard to swallow as “You have cancer.” I get it. All the way to “You’re cancer free.” Hearing those magical words is a fountain of goodness. The same one who ordered your treatment and saw you through therapy. You probably send them a card every year. Remember the doc who had the brains to diagnosis your cancer, based on that blood work? I bet you do. If you were a cancer survivor you wouldn’t tell a person diagnosed with cancer, “I wouldn’t sweat that…let it ride another year.” You’d jump all over directing them to the provider that saved your life. Sure, it’s not for everyone, but for a lot us it’s the answer to feeling good and keeping us healthy. It feels funny talking about it, but embarrassed is the wrong way to think about your therapy. As if anybody other than your bed partner ever sees you sporting one. Most of my guesses would involve embarrassment over wearing a mask to sleep. I can’t say for sure why this is, but I can guess. CPAP users, with typical silence, bury the inconvenient truth of treatment in the closet. I made the statement CPAP patients aren’t stoked to share the fact they’re on therapy. I talked about this in my last BLOG post for a brief moment.
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