Search Results for: apnea – Page 2

I’ve grown complacent about travelling in recent years. I went from doing very little of it, to doing a whole lot, and somewhere along the line I stopped fretting about the logistics of getting places and packing things. I paid for that, over the weekend. Three nights in Melbourne with antidepressants and a power chord for the CPAP machine meant I was feeling particularly blunted by the end of the trip. I yawned a lot. I got light-headed in the afternoons, just like I did before the apnea was treated. I had headaches and wasn’t quite so in-charge of my emotional state as I’ve grown used to in recent weeks. Now I am home and medicated and catching up on sleep. Still blunt, but getting sharper, and vowing not to leave things behind again. I went to see Nerve last night, and it was terrible, but exactly the right kind of terrible for my mood and mental state. If you’re okay

Four days of a sore throat and runny nose. Four nights without using my CPAP machine to regulate my sleep apnea, which means I wake every day with a head full of cotton wool, exhaustion, and nascent craziness waiting to be given form. I slough around the house, coughing up phlegm. I sleep in fifteen minute bursts, before my own biology revolts and wakes me up to start consciously sucking down air again. I do not trust myself to react to anything, because all my reactions are basically insane: extreme; ill-formed; straight from the exhausted, primal Id. I cannot be trusted to engage with other people. I can barely be trusted with the written word. I was planning on starting a new project in June – a short, straight-rush project contained by thirty days, just to see if I could manage it. This is going to make things interesting.  

I haven’t finished a short story in years. It’s a thing I’ll bust out in conversations about writing, even though the evidence of its untruth is out there. I have written stories. Some were published. Many were not. This is probably for the best, since they were mostly fiction written in the grip of the apnea fugue, and it’s hard to really understand what I intended beyond insert words on blank page so I can tick the writing box and pretend nothing is wrong. This is not a good way to write. Especially when you realise there’s a problem, get it treated, and discover that checking the box doesn’t actually mean much. And so, in my head, I stopped writing short fiction, despite the evidence to the contrary. When I did write it, I failed to finish it. The things I finished, by and large, were because people asked me to write things and the terror of letting said people down hurt

It’s cold and grey in Brisbane this morning. My alarm just went off, alerting me that it’s time to get up, which would be awesome but for the fact that I have been awake for two and half hours now. There are very few things I miss about having undiagnosed and untreated sleep apnea, but the ability to wake up early, realise that it’s bullshit o’clock, and go back to sleep is definitely one of them. These days, if I wake up at bullshit o’clock, I get up at bullshit o’clock. On the plus side, I get some writing done. Words on the story draft. Words on the novella re-write. Words here, which tend to be the third priority in a day, and thus becomes the thing that suffers when my priorities undergo tectonic shifts. It is cold and grey out there this morning. Perfect writing weather. I kinda wish I could fuck off work for the day, sit here

Last night, I went to an after-hours forward planning meeting at work. I had a sinus headache when I went in that got worse as the evening went along. This is not uncommon: one of the side-effects of CPAP treatment is the occasional night where you throat and nasal passages are…well, insufficiently humidified. Then irritated. Then inflamed. And the moment my sinuses inflame, they tend to press down on the nerves on my already irritatingly-sensitive teeth. Instant headache. Pain shooting through the nerves right underneath my eye. Until I learned the ’cause of it – eventually pointed out by my dentist, after two straight years where I’d come in during heyfever season convinced I needed a root canal – I would spend some quality time in bed, wishing for death. I would avoid air-conditioning, which tended to trigger things. I would loathe the very world around me. After I learned the cause, I just drank warm cups of water to

I turn thirty-nine today. As is traditional, I am posting the first-thing-I-Do-On-My-Birthday-Ugly-Selfie, because no birthday is complete until my parents ring wondering why in hell I would put such a thing on the internet. This year, we celebrate the new reality of me and sleep: Occasionally, just for the hell of it, I will wake up and say Luke, I am your Father, just ’cause the breathing effects are right. It was about this point, last year, that I fell asleep while driving and finally got to the point that my doctor to thought hmmm, maybe sleep apnea? We should send you for tests. It took a really long time to get to that point, but I’m incredibly happy that shit got sorted out. Years of feeling like I was somehow broken, and suddenly there was a fix. Thirty-eight was a pretty good year, as a result. I look forward to thirty-nine. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I shall go and celebrate my birthday