A Sleep Solution

I’ve not been keeping up with the blog much on this trip. That’s mostly because there hasn’t been much to write about without getting into a ton of medical details. I can’t imagine anyone want to read all that, and I probably would be wise not to post all that publicly!

However, I can post that the sleep lab visits are probably complete for this summer. We did discover that a device known as an ASV holds an excellent chance of resolving my complex sleep apnea issues. The main importance of this is that the sleep apnea almost certainly was the stress that caused the heart attacks, so alleviating the apnea is important for avoiding future heart problems.

Just today I met with a respiratory therapist who introduced me to the ASV device that I took home with me. In last week’s testing, this device did prevent all episodes of central and obstructive apnea and hypopnea events at certain settings. It did not work so well with other settings that were tried. So, the machine is set at about where it should be. It has the ability to adjust to my breathing on a continual basis. Also, it has a transmitter that continually communicates recorded data to the nearest cell phone tower and on to the Cloud. For at least the next few weeks both the sleep doctor and the respiratory therapist will be monitoring this data on a daily basis. Any tweaks to the settings on this device can be made remotely via the Cloud by either the doctor of the therapist.

I’m encouraged and pretty excited about this development. It may end up being a difficult process to tweak the device to suit my breathing, but we’re quite hopeful that within a few weeks the device will be giving me the best sleep I’ve had in decades. Amazing thought. Oh and I’ve been able to sleep the last three nights (unbeknownst to me!) without taking a sleeping pill. That’s another positive development!

Here are a couple pics of my ASV…