4 ms·
One would hope. It took me until early adulthood to get diagnosed with sleep apnea because doctors had repeatedly told me such things as "you can't have sleep a
by Hydraulix989 7y ago
One would hope. It took me until early adulthood to get diagnosed with sleep apnea because doctors had repeatedly told me such things as "you can't have sleep apnea if you're not overweight," "you have good grades in school and don't have trouble running 3 miles at track practice, you must not be THAT tired," "every teenager is tired, you just need to improve your sleep schedule," "you need to cut caffeine," and by far the worst -- "you're just depressed, let me put you on Prozac".
These are competent/highly trained doctors that aren't in the Bay Area or New York but are in a US tech hub containing a Top 15 medical school.
After I insisted on a sleep study, the results came back as me having SEVERE obstructive sleep apnea with 30 cessations of breath per hour (once every 2 minutes) while asleep. You just don't notice it while you're asleep because your body kicks itself out of REM sleep into lighter, less productive sleep but you're not consciously awakened whenever it happens.
I even heard the last two ("you just need an earlier bedtime" and "you're depressed") EVEN after showing my doctors the sleep study results with the actual data. Terrible.
If you go on /r/sleepapnea, you'll find that these kind of stories are still surprisingly and unfortunately very common.
I have jaw surgery at Stanford on the books for early next year to finally fix this.