Healthy Obsessions The Adventures of a Mild Obsessive Compulsive

Category Archives: Sleep

Sleep Tracking Poll

October 29, 2010 6:19 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

I am curious about how other people think about this sort of stuff. Do you find it interesting? Boring? Of value? Problematic? Indication of societal decline and the end of days?

Sleep seems like a problematic area for most of the people I know. I wonder if this extends as far into the general population as I think it does. From all the articles and websites dedicated to the topic, you’d think so. But then, you rarely hear from people when they’re happy; you most often hear from them when they have a complaint (if nothing else, working in video gaming has taught me that).

At any rate, I’m curious to see how many people find tracking of value.

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Posted in: OCD Dream Gear, Record Keeping, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , ,

Fitbit & Zeo Graphs

October 28, 2010 11:35 am ⋅ 5 Comments ⋅

Because a picture is worth a thousand words, and, honestly, because I am feeling too tired to do much of a write up on anything today… The sleep graphs from last night, starting with the fitbit.

 

Fitbit Graph for 10-27-2010

And now the Zeo:

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Posted in: Medical, Record Keeping, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

The Day After Turbinate Reduction

October 27, 2010 12:28 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

 

Turbinate Reduction (snagged from Atlanta Snoring Institute)

 

It felt very weird. Not painful, but weird. The whole process took less than an hour.

Step 1

The doctor’s assistant numbed the inside of my nose using lidocaine on a q-tip.

Step 2

The doctor injected a local anesthetic twice on both sides. That’s when I started feeling light headed. It’s apparently very common for patients to faint at that point, since the injections are taking place in an area with a lot of nerves.

Dr. Robson Capasso (who introduces himself by his first name, which I like) tilted the chair back for me as soon as I said I was feeling light headed (which nicely prevented me from falling out of the chair, yay). He had a resident shadowing him, and so he was explaining as he did things (and you know how awesome I find that).

Step 3

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Posted in: Medical, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

Turbinate Reduction, Because Breathing is Fun

October 26, 2010 12:26 pm ⋅ 9 Comments ⋅

Today at 3:00 I’ll be sitting in an exam room at the Stanford Sleep Clinic, essentially getting the inside of my nose cooked. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it?

It’s called radiofrequency turbinate reduction. My boyfriend got it done, also, as part of his general sleep apnea surgery four or five years ago (his surgery worked; sadly, I am not a candidate for that same surgery since I do not have the same structural cause).

But back to the procedure itself. To quote obstructednose.com:

All of these methods aim to shrink the underlying turbinate by applying heat to the surface lining of the turbinate and creating a lesion. A probe is inserted into the turbinate tissue between one and six times, while the needle is heated and the underlying tissue is shrunk.

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Posted in: Medical, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

The Zeo Arrived

October 25, 2010 7:33 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Zeo arrived today. I haven’t even opened it yet.

Posted in: Medical, Record Keeping, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , ,

Acupuncture for Sleep Apnea?

October 21, 2010 7:10 pm ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

Edward Burnes-Jones' Sleeping Beauty

Wouldn’t that be nice?

In my obsessive googling of those terms, I came across an interesting article abstract.

It’s not conclusive, not by a long shot. And I wish I had access to the full article, but since I’m no longer university faculty, I no longer have access to those databases. I hear that I could just go to the Stanford Medical Library and plop myself down there to do research. Can’t take any materials, but could at least read them on site.

Wait a minute. Scratch that. Sono.org, you have come to my rescue! Voila.

It’s a small study. Only 26 completed it, and that’s hardly a sufficient sample size. Then again, with this sort of thing you’re already limited by access to patients with sleep apnea who are willing to try acupuncture and (likely) don’t have other medical issues going on to cloud results. Not a huge group. Of course, we also need studies like this to prove that it’s worth the investment to do larger studies.

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Posted in: Medical, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

Acupuncture = Awesome

October 18, 2010 4:32 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

It actually helped. A lot.

I don’t understand the mechanism of action. But after my appointment on Friday, I had about 30 degrees more rotation in my neck and the pain was significantly decreased. I went again today, and I now have full rotation (no, not Exorcist level rotation, I mean standard side to side human rotation).

I’ve been told that the acupuncturist can treat my sleeping difficulties, and my menstrual problems, and my allergies, and my pain. I’d really like to believe this, because dear lord do I want those problems fixed. But I truly don’t understand the *how* of it. Unless…

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Posted in: Medical, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Comparison: Fitbit vs. Sleep Cycle

October 7, 2010 6:31 pm ⋅ 4 Comments ⋅

This comparison isn’t going to be precisely fair, since I’ve been using my fitbit for about 10 months, and I only used Sleep Cycle (an iPhone app) for one night. But I can definitely give some initial impressions.

I’ve already talked about how useful I find the information from my fitbit. Here’s the data from last night, and no, I’m not sure what I was doing up at 2:41; I was on Ambien and it seemed like a good idea at the time:

Here is that same night, from Sleep Cycle:

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Posted in: Medical, OCD Dream Gear, Record Keeping, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Slightly Better Sleep

October 1, 2010 2:27 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Tried a different CPAP mask last night and, according to my fitbit, slept slightly better.

Slight improvement with different mask.

Still not great. I should be around 95% sleep efficiency, ideally. And I ought to have more full sleep cycles in there; most people need a full 90 minutes to have a complete sleep cycle. It looks like I had two blocks that were long enough. I really would like to have three full cycles a night.

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Posted in: Medical, OCD Dream Gear, Record Keeping, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

Fitbit: Tracking My Sleep, and My Sleep Does Not Look Good

September 30, 2010 5:17 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

I am tired.

Very, very tired.

Not sound sleep.

This was last night. 18 times awakened. Bah. And this isn’t even bad in comparison to the last few weeks. For this same night, my CPAP tells me I was averaging 12 hypopneas an hour. This is not good. But it’s better than the 25 I got a few days ago, which, according to the fitbit, translated into 38 times awakened during that night:

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Posted in: Idiocy, Medical, OCD Dream Gear, Record Keeping, Sleep ⋅ Tagged: , , ,