Sleep Apnea, User Stories
Discovering Sleep Apnea – Anna’s Story
We like to hear from our users to find out how they use the app and what they have done to combat their snoring. With these user stories, we hope you can pick up some great tips and gain some motivation to address your snoring too.
This story comes from Anna who sent us an email about her experience.
As someone who had never heard of obstructive sleep apnea, Anna used her SnoreLab recordings and the information on our website to investigate her sleep health in more detail. She has since seen remarkable changes after receiving a sleep apnea diagnosis and the necessary treatment …
Dear SnoreLab,
I simply wanted to write to express my heartfelt thanks to you for the app you have developed, as well as the array of sleep information and resources that you provide on your website.
For more years than I can remember, I have woken every morning feeling beyond exhausted and unable to function, made worse by frequent headaches and nausea that plagued my mornings if I had consumed alcohol the night before.
I thought I had grown intolerant to alcohol, I have also had uncontrollable high blood pressure for many years, which I had thought was causing my frequent waking up at night with night sweats and heart palpitations.
I just couldn’t understand how people around me had so much energy, and kept pushing myself to do more than my energy reserves could cope with, but the situation was getting steadily worse and I was convinced there was something badly wrong with my health that I couldn’t figure out.
At age 36 – I felt like I was 86.
I have always snored, quite loudly, but in recent months my husband kept waking me because my snoring had grown so much louder and, as he put it, sounded extremely painful and distressing – as though I couldn’t quite breathe.
Alongside this, I started getting persistent sinus pain and bleeding, and my night-time waking frequency was increasing dramatically.
After some research, I found SnoreLab and thought it would be useful to be able to track my snoring, and also what remedies might help to reduce it – and improve the quality of sleep we both got.
My first few nights were a shock, both in terms of hearing the sheer volume of my Epic snoring, as well as the duration of my snoring – often at its loudest and most painful sounding just before I woke up in the night. I sounded like I was being strangled! I would listen to short sections, and then couldn’t listen to any more of the recording – both shocked and slightly disturbed by the sounds I made in my sleep!
I tried some remedies to begin with – throat sprays, incline pillows, etc. – but they only led to marginal improvements. I continued reading more and more of the resources on SnoreLab and came across an article about sleep apnea, a condition I was unfamiliar with.
I started listening back to my recordings in detail, rather than just the snippets I had listened to previously, and I started hearing long pauses in my breathing, gasping, and long episodes where it sounded like I was struggling to get a breath into my lungs.
Unsure, I spoke to a private sleep disorder consultant who listened to my recordings and who asked more about my background. He was certain I was a very likely to be suffering from sleep apnea and suggested a 2-day home sleep study, which I agreed to. Within a week I had my diagnosis of moderate sleep apnoea, and within 2 weeks I had my CPAP machine.
My life, as a result of this treatment, has been transformed!
I wake every single morning with so much more energy than I have previously had in my living memory. I have clarity, my headaches are gone, my racing heart rate and night time awakenings have gone, I can do normal things without feeling like I’m running a marathon, my resting heart rate and blood pressure are coming down from dangerous levels, I’m losing weight more easily…..the list is endless.
Frankly, I didn’t know how abnormal my “normal” had been, until I started this treatment and realised what normal SHOULD feel like.
All of this started with SnoreLab, and it has given me my life back. That’s why I wanted to write to say thank you – if it hadn’t been for SnoreLab, I would still have been in depressed, exhausted ignorance of how different life could be.
So, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Many people with obstructive sleep apnea remain undiagnosed. People can often have headaches, feel excessively tired and have difficulty staying focussed, but they often don’t make the link with snoring. Sleep apnea is simply a condition that many people haven’t heard of.
Anna was able to identify some tell-tale signs of sleep apnea on SnoreLab and pushed for a sleep study which has given her a reliable diagnosis. You can read about what a sleep study entails here.
She has since made massive strides to improve not only her sleep health, but her risk of many associated conditions.
You can read more about what sleep apnea is and investigating sleep apnea with SnoreLab’s insights.
All of our user stories are genuine accounts from SnoreLab users. If you’d care to share your experience about using SnoreLab, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact us on support@snorelab.com or get in touch via Facebook or Twitter.
In the interest of privacy for our users, names and pictures may be changed. We use the wording quoted to us by our users but may make small stylistic changes.