Illustration by Gemini AI, Prompt by Author

One morning my wife told me that during the previous night she had gotten out of bed to get a drink of water and noticed that as I lay there in bed, I was not breathing.

For a disturbingly long time.

Then suddenly I gasped for air, started breathing, rolled over, and began breathing normally again. This was not her first experience with this kind of behavior. A previous husband had suffered from obstructive sleep apnea and had to use a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine when he slept.

At my wife’s urging, I emailed my primary physician at Kaiser Permanente. I like my primary doctor at Kaiser. As is the norm at Kaiser, I have never been able to schedule an appointment to see her, but she is always polite and professional in our email communications.

Upon hearing what my wife had reported, my Kaiser doctor referred me to the Kaiser sleep department—home of the Kaiser sleep people—for a home sleep study. The sleep people asked me to fill out a form, which had several questions, most of which were different ways of asking whether I felt sleepy during daytime hours.

I didn’t think I felt sleepy during the day, but after filling out the form, I started to…

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My Brief Adventure with Sleep Apnea