Apparently, Ms. P has been getting no REM sleep. At all. She went for a sleep study last night, and while the tech couldn't tell her anything about her results, as he put it, if she registered a certain number of apneas in a given period of time, they'd switch her over in the middle of the night to the CPAP machine to see if it helped, and she could draw her own conclusions. But she didn't hear it from him.
So yeah, no REM. Serious, chronic sleep deprivation of this order is associated with everything from weight gain to ADHD-like symptoms to bipolar to type II diabetes. Scary stuff.
Of course, now we have to wait for a week for the official conversation with the doctor and then there's another delay until she gets the CPAP itself, but this is really good news.
In less good news, my sister is having surgery next Friday to see if she has endometriosis. There's only three women in my generation on any side of my family, and two of us had already been diagnosed, so this is troubling, to say the least. Even more troubling was that my sister was planning to spend the long weekend entirely alone, without help of any kind, and no one thought this was a problem worth doing anything about. Having had that surgery, I know that plan is total crap. Maybe she'll recover more easily than I did, but it was days before I could make lunch for myself, much less do anything more complicated.
But yeah, lots of health issues, none of them mine this time.
Yikes. No REM at all? Not good. But terrific to have identified it.
Posted by: dale | May 15, 2008 at 06:38 PM