Sleep Apnea & Epilepsy

Re: Re: Sleep Apnea & Epilepsy

Submitted by gretchen1 on Sat, 2006-08-12 - 15:10

I have confirmed sleep apnea that is severe in that my oxygen saturations drop extremely low and don't rebound well. This has bee confirmed by two sleep labs, and wearing testing equipment at home. I also have a slew of nocturnals where my 02 sats drop precipitously low. I have some other sleep disorders too. I know this is dangerous but the "cure" is CPAP or BiCAP and believe me I HAVE tried and I know I'd feel better if I could use these devices and I HAVE tried so hard on so many nights I stopped counting, but I absolutely can not go to sleep with that on my face. I have asthma too. Asthmatics tend to feel very paniced with anything covering our mouths and noses. Even just forced air with an 02 mask is very quickly intolerable to me, I feel paniced. If I wear CPAP or BiCAP I lay awake all night, night after night, fighting that panic and I don't want to start using sleep meds plus my 02 sats go so low, sleep meds tend to slow your respirations too, that's no option. I did wear oxygen to bed for a year with just a rebreather mask, that I can tolerate. I also wear an oxymeter when I sleep that has an alarm on it set to alarm if my sats drop to a preset level and it didn't seem passive air or oxygen helped. I recently discontinued it. I will write to you though. Is it related Lisa? I'm not really sure. One of the technicians told me he sees apnea a lot in epileptics but to be REAL frank I've been told so much malarky by some technicians, who shouldn't be telling us things like this, I ignored it. My husband FINALLY finished some, hopefully, life saving cardiac treatments and we've had just horrid troubles with the technician. She's been inappropriate to the max. We reported her. She was "injured" (called "retrained" I think) for 1.5 weeks. She came back and was WORSE! I used to have a lot of EEGs by a tech. that would "read" my EEGs for me, was always wrong, but scared the daylights out of me sometimes. The doctors of the sleep labs I went to didn't make this correlation voluntarily nor did I ask. When I have a sz I tend to make a very poor to no respiratory effort and somehow they were able to make the distinction between a sz and apnea although the length of each was nearly the same and the 02 sat drop was about the same. Gretchen