SemiConscious Dot Org

I’ve never been a heavy sleeper. Even when I was a kid, I seldom conked out for more than six or seven hours per night. In the past year or two, however, things have gotten worse. I wake up before the alarm goes off, feeling like I’ve been asleep for five minutes, more tired than when I went to bed; I snore like a freight train, regardless of whether I sleep on my back, stomach, or on either side; and my fiance tells me that I stop breathing when I sleep, sometimes for as long as ten or twenty seconds at a time. Just about the time my non-breathing begins to freak her out and she moves to wake me up, I rouse myself back to life with huge, roaring snorts that shake the bed and can be heard in neighboring apartments. I can’t remember the last time I had a dream.

The constant fatigue has started to have an increasingly negative effect on my waking life as well. I’ve spent most of the past few months in a dull, fuzzy haze through which no emotions seem able to penetrate. I’m so utterly tired that it’s been ages since I was able to summon the energy to feel angry or sad or happy about anything; an occasional sense of irritable surliness is all I can muster. I have trouble concentrating on what anybody is saying to me, losing the thread of conversations easily and getting irritable as a result. I’m messing up at work.

I’ve been told by someone to whom I told my symptoms that they felt something very similar when they were on anti-depressants. If this is what anti-depressants are like, I think I’d rather be depressed.

On Monday, I’m going to the hospital to get tested for sleep apnea. Given that I exhibit the most distinctive symptom of this disorder, it seems likely that I have some form of it. What freaks me out is that there are many forms, of greatly varying severity, requiring treatments ranging anywhere from losing weight to medicine to surgery to wearing an oxygen mask to bed for the rest of my life. Depending on how long one has had it, apnea can also cause long-term damage to one’s heart and respiratory system. And I’m pretty sure I’ve had it my entire adult life.

Or maybe it’s all in my head. Maybe I’m just paranoid and overreacting. Lack of sleep will do that to a person.