0:40 great to meet you you too i thought we’d go ahead and dive right in
0:43 um certainly appreciate your time today um as i mentioned my name is Manny Duenas I’m with a new nonprofit and uh
look forward to learning more about your journey with sleep apnea today. So maybe we could start if you could tell me a little bit about yourself, you know how old you are, where you’re from that kind of thing
1:00 I’m 35, from southern Minnesota a small town there. um I do local government i.t for a living. I have a son and a wife and that’s pretty much it.
1:11 wonderful and uh when did you first realize that you had a sleep issue
1:18 uh i have no idea actually. when it first started um but i first kind of became more aware of it back in 2016-ish.
1:25 i remember i would have times where i would snore myself awake. my snoring was so bad and then i decided to kind of record myself sleeping just to see how bad it actually was
1:37 and it was then that i kind of realized that okay i am holding my breath while i sleep for long periods of time then i would wake up and kind of gasp
1:45 and then i would basically repeat like that. i would snore horribly and then hold my breath and then gasp and wake up and i thought okay this
1:52 is not normal i need to get checked out and see what’s wrong with um
1:57 and maybe you can tell me a little bit about uh how long it took you once you realized something was wrong how long. did it take you to go find a doctor
2:04 way too long um i pretty much started by doing some research on what it could be figuring
out it could potentially be sleep apnea
2:12 but then i figured i don’t necessarily meet the target demographic that is most affected by sleep apnea and i’m not um older and and mostly affects older people
2:24 from what i had read at the time and then there was a lot of i guess fear about what it could possibly be and what i have to do to get resolved and more or less the fear of the unknown
2:36 I guess you could say got it and uh where where did you where had you done your research um
2:41 different places that checked webmd and things of that nature and then i found uh once i figured out i might have sleep apnea i checked cpaptalk.com as well as apneaboard.com and then also the sleep apnea subreddits on reddit
2:58 okay okay and which of those were most helpful
3:00 uh they were all pretty helpful to me i would say because they had lots of information on first-hand accounts with people that had it and kind of were going through the same stuff as as i had been
3:11 and i was able to read through their stories and say yep that sounds like something i had experienced
3:15 and then from there i kind of was able to gain more information on what it was how it was treated and that it wasn’t as bad as i thought it was
3:24 i guess for the most part uh the treatments themselves yeah
3:27 what was concerning to you about the treatment
3:29 a lot of it was just not knowing how it was treated or if it was even treatable because there wasn’t there’s not a ton of information and there’s a lot of misinformation out there about sleep apnea and a lot of fear about um how it’s treated and also
3:46 the stigma of having to you know wear a cap every single night and what is if you’re sleeping with someone what are they going to think about you wearing that device every night and
3:55 might be a turn off and things of that nature
3:57 and so you mentioned that it took you a while to go see a doctor was it months or years how long did it take
4:03 it took probably four or five months i would say.
4:06 and during this time you were doing research
4:07 yes um i tried to gain as much knowledge as i could about it and then i decided i pretty much had had enough of feeling the way i had so i went to the doctor just to get a formal diagnosis and then see what he had to say about it was it a pcp or what
4:23 did you go straight to a sleep specialist
4:25 went to my normal care doctor and then he recommended a sleep study
4:30 did he have to give you a referral for that
4:31 yes yep
4:33 and uh when you finally got the sleep study um what were the results uh they had found
4:39 that i basically especially in my sleeping on my back i had roughly 40 events per hour and they diagnosed me with um moderate obstructive sleep apnea
4:52 which is basically where your throat muscles loosen themselves up and too much and it basically cuts off your air supply yeah
Quality of Life
5:00 so and so um you know have you noticed any sort of impacts to your quality of life as a result of the sleep apnea
5:07 absolutely! um i guess not so much at the time because i had had it for so long that it felt normal so i didn’t even realize anything was wrong
5:17 at this point i can kind of describe myself as running on autopilot. You could ask me something and ten minutes later i would have little to no recollection of what you asked me
5:26 I was tired constantly and no amount of sleep i would have would seem to help
5:33 i could sleep for eight hours and feel like i had stuff for an hour afterwards
5:36 thankfully it wasn’t as big a big enough issue to cause issues driving or anything that could have been dangerous but it was more noticeable when i would go to plays and things of that nature where it was dark
5:49 I’d be fine until the lights would go out and then the lights would turn off and it was just like a switch that would flip in my brain
5:57 i would instantly have issues trying to stay awake um i would have little recollection of what the play was about because i would basically be spending my entire time fighting to stay awake
6:07 a similar thing with movies perhaps
6:09 uh yeah yeah
6:10 and you mentioned that you didn’t have any issues with driving. did you caffeinate at all
6:17 yeah, I drank a good amount of like mountain dew and things of that nature
6:21 at work did you notice any sort of challenges with with getting work done or anything like that
6:26 a lot of it had to do with being able to concentrate and retain information for the most part otherwise
Performance
6:31 my actual performance wasn’t impacted too much. you know when you when you got off of work and notice any impacts there um with your energy level i had very little desire to do a whole lot um yeah it was a lot of lazy nights on the couch and not not feeling like i wanted to go and do
6:49 anything for the most part go to bed at a normal time uh usually
6:53 i’m more of a night owl so i tend to go to bed around 10 11 12 ish so and then wake up around 6 30 in the morning
7:01 okay when you woke up did you notice any challenges there with uh waking up
7:05 uh waking up was terrible. usually um didn’t want to get out of bed especially during the winter when it’s dark in the morning
7:11 any challenges sort of with your mood or anything like that
7:15 i didn’t notice a whole lot about with my mood. For the most part it was more i definitely lacked a personality though i think at that time because it was mostly like i said
7:24 like i was running on autopilot for the most part just doing the bare minimum to get by and not have to engage myself mentally too much because i wasn’t able to at that point
