I'm going to delay the second part of my Drinking Problem post 'til tomorrow when I'm not as swamped with deadlines and also because I received a few questions like this one from Jess Camen…
You said you have Sleep Apnea. I've read all sorts of explanations of what it is but I've never heard anyone who had it actually describe how it feels. Could you tell me?
Well, now that I sleep with a CPAP unit, it feels fine. The main thing I tell people is that before I started spending the night with this breathing device strapped to my kisser, I slept so restlessly that in eight hours, I got about three hours of genuine, useful sleep. I also snored so loudly that one time at a hotel, a girl friend literally got up, took a couple of the blankets and went out and slept on the balcony with the sliding glass door closed. Now, I rarely snore, I sleep about five hours a night and I awake refreshed.
Before I was diagnosed, I was sluggish and drowsy much of the day and I fell asleep in the darnedest places. The freeway, as I mentioned, was one. Almost as dangerous was during a meeting at CBS. One minute, I was telling network execs how exciting the show I was writing for them would be. The next, I was sound asleep in my chair. (I was with a producer who had the presence of mind to say something like, "Mark's been working so hard on this script that he's been staying up nights." Amazingly, they bought that, being unaware I had yet to start on the script. I'd actually slept eight hours the night before but woke up feeling like it was around two.)
Sleep Apnea is a lot more common than most folks think and it is said that there are countless undiagnosed cases out there. If you doze off when you shouldn't or you get up from sleeping feeling more tired than when you laid down, you oughta go get checked for it. It could be many things but it could be Sleep Apnea. And should you want to know more about my experiences, here's a link to an article I wrote back in 1996.