This Geek

Oh my good gravy I’m tired.

I aimed to be in bed early last night. Didn’t happen. Typical. I ended up getting in to bed around midnight, which isn’t too horrible, but then some wanker broke the golden rule about not phoning me for support between the hours of 9pm and 6am. So at 02h20 this morning, I was rudely woken up with something that turned out to be not my problem anyway. And I wasn’t on stand by. Grr! So, having OSA (even though I’m on CPAP), has not made today much fun for me.

What irritates me about my current CPAP unit, is that I have no idea if it’s actually treating me properly. It’s only got basic readouts, and has no software support, so I don’t know if I’m still having apnea events or not. Sometimes I wake up feeling fine, and other days (like today), I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.

I’ve been having the CPAP treatment for about two weeks now. It’s taking me a long time to get used to the mask - but I’m finally sleeping through the night (mostly). My only problem so far is that because of the tightness of the mask initially - I developed (almost literally overnight) a pressure sore just above the right hand side of my top lip. It wasn’t too painful, but now it has developed into a cluster of really painful pimples. The pain from that caused me to take my mask off at about 4 this morning - it was getting a bit too much. Hopefully I’ll have a better night tonight.

I’m meeting with a rep from a different medical company on Wednesday - I’m going to be fitted for some new masks. I’m getting a Respironics Comfortgel mask to replace the Fisher & Paykel HC405 that I’m not really happy with - and I’m also getting a ComfortFull 2 full face mask to use in those times when I’m sick or have nasal congestion. It’s a crapload of money for these damn things here - around $250 for the full face mask, and around $150 for the Comfortgel (That’s based on ~7.4 exchange rate). Insane prices - but then this is also my second choice mask. I would have preferred to go for a Resmed Ultra Mirage Activa nasal mask, but that sucker is around $240! And the problem is that the company that sells the Resmed products is not contracted out to the medical aids (insurance), so I would have to fork out of my own pocket and claim back. Not good, because I don’t have that kind of money. At least with the other company, they deal directly with the medical aids, so I don’t have to physically spend a cent.

Back to the treatment - I am definitely noticing a difference. I still have tiredness - but that’s usually in the morning. I’m much more alert now, and I don’t have the desire to doze off while I’m driving home from work. so it seems the treatment is starting to work.

I don’t know how long it will take until I feel “normal” - or what I think “normal” is supposed to feel like, as I’ve had this for so many years, that I never realised that anything was wrong.

Thinking back with my new found knowledge, it certainly explains some of the happenings in my life when I was in high school, so I’ve had this condition at least since then, if not all my life.

Kinda sad to go through life for 31 years not knowing that it could actually have been better.

I slept with the assistance of my very own CPAP machine. It’s a top-of-the-line Fisher & Paykel HC608 (Linked in the last post), with humidifithingymabob and heated hoojakawhatsit. Since I tend to get sinusitis on a regular basis, I need the moistened air so that my sinuses don’t freak out from a constant air flow (which, I must say, is a breath of fresh air) (smirk). It’s quite nifty, since the air pipe is heated (Not so you’d notice), it prevents condensation building up inside the tube, thereby avoiding an apparently annoying gurgling noise. I’ll have to take their word for it. The problem with that though, is that condensation forms inside the mask, and I spent the night (unsuccessfully) avoiding the icy cold puddle of moisture that had formed in the bottom of the mask.

It’s really crappy — you’re too deur die blare to actually wake up and take care of the annoyance, so you live with it. sigh, maybe one day I’ll learn.

It’s a bit premature to tell if the therapy is working or not. Admittedly I wasn’t feeling so bleh (Technical term) this morning when I woke up, but I’m feeling darn right sleepy as I type this 2 hours later. Time will tell. (The damn thing had better work. The whole kit and caboodle cost over R7k. Gotta love medical aid.)

So I’ve changed my theme. Whoop. It’s quite a change from the old one. I’ll keep this around for awhile… I’ve got plenty sitting on the back-burner, so if it’s different every time you visit, don’t be surprised.

(Mind you, who the heck visits here anyway?)

I went for the 2nd sleep lab on the 7th, as I mentioned in my last post. Technically, it wasn’t a sleep lab, since I was only hooked up to the CPAP machine, though it was monitoring and recording what was happening.

The neurophysiologist (what a mouthful) told me that I have around 60 apnoeas per hour, which means I’m not breathing for 20 seconds of every minute in an hour. She said “severe” cases are only around 40 apnoeas per hour, so I have it to the extreme, especially for my age. She says she usually sees apnoea this badly in people over 75 years old. Apparently my oxygen levels drop to below 80% (in some cases as low as 75%), which apparently is quite bad for the heart, and can lead to heart failure. Fun.

Being connected to the CPAP machine wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. I could get used it. Actually, I have to get used to it. sigh Despite (or perhaps because of) being hooked up to the CPAP machine, I slept quite badly. The nursing staff at the hospital didn’t help either. Damn they pissed me off.

When I did the first sleep lab - the polysomnogram - I was supposed to be sleeping while the machine recorded what happened while I slept… so the stupid fucking nursing staff woke me sometime after 4am as if I was a normal hospital patient. Considering the CPAP trial was in a different part of the hospital, where they seemed to be used to patients coming in for these trials, I thought they would have a clue. Not so. For one thing, someone opened my room door at around 1am, so I woke up (it’s a noisy door). Then again around 3. And then another stupid-ass nurse came in at around 04h40 and yelled loudly ‘Good Morning!’. She was lucky I had the breathing mask on my face, otherwise I would have told her to fuck right off. I was not impressed. I gave them a bad mark on the patient satisfaction survey when I was discharged. Suck on that. :p (Yeah yeah, childish I know.)

(Thanks Drusky)

Server hard disk crashed, so the site was offline for awhile.

Had lots of fun recovering the disk. Did a bit-for-bit image of the old disk to the new one, and the problems followed along. sigh

So we repartitioned from scratch without using LVM (Which I suspect was causing the problem the whole time),  and manually copied everything over.  Thankfully that worked without a hitch.

I then decided, in my genius, to attempt an OS upgrade.  That went more-or-less smoothly; the few issues I had were resolved rather quickly.  Since the new OS upgraded the PHP and MySQL to version 5, I had a few issues with my sites.  This one had a problem with one of the text formatting plugins (I’m tired, so the name escapes me right now), so I had to disable it.  If any of the entries look funky, that’s why.  Hopefully there’s a bug fix for the plugin soon, cuz I kind of like it.

The other (more serious) issue I had was transferring my vbulletin forum from its backup host to this one.  I didn’t think there would be much of an issue, since the backup host is running PHP & MySQL 5.  Turns out that Murphy has a sense of humor.

There’s an obscure bug with one of the queries that vbulletin runs when it opens a forum for viewing that causes MySQL 5.0.0.21 (or whatever) to crash.  Fun fun.  Thankfully the guys at vbulletin.com have a temporary code fix to sort out the issue until a new version of MySQL comes out.  It took me a frikkin’ age to get the patch applied (had to do it manually unfortunately), cuz I was tired and I just could not grasp what I was doing.  The code block that I had to change was about 20 lines or so, but only about 3 lines actually changed.  I must’ve tried the patch about 5 times before I realised a missing brace was stuffing me around the whole time.  Arrrgh!  It was really annoying, because you go through a stage (after about the 3rd attempt) that you start thinking the patch just doesn’t work in your environment.   Thankfully that was not the case.

In other news, updating on the Sleep Apnoea bit; I got a call from the neurophysiologist, and she told me that according to the sleep lab tests, I test positive for Obstructive Sleep Apnoea.  Joy.

I get to go do another sleep lab on the 7th where they’re going to test CPAP on me.

I’ve been a snorer for many years. It’s never really bothered me much though. Lately it seems to be bothering my wife alot; I don’t know why all of a sudden, it’s not like it’s a new thing. Anyway, I finally decided to go see my ENT about it.

I told him my symptoms:

• I snore no matter what position I’m in (I could be standing on my head, and I’d snore)
• I wake up tired
• I fall asleep at the drop of a hat
• I struggle to stay awake while: driving, watching tv, sitting in a meeting, etc I also mentioned that I’ve been told several times by different people whom I’ve kept awake with my snoring that I stop breathing for short periods when I sleep.

He told me that surgery works very well. For three months or so… So he’s not an advocate of surgery. Good thing that, because I’m not a particular fan of it either, and I’ve read some scary stories by people who’ve had surgery to “cure” sleep apnoea. Now I have to contact a sleep laboratory, and get hooked up to all sorts of machines for a sleep test. (My only question is: How do I study??? :D)