1/14/2013: Defining Moments - Becoming and Athlete and Sleep Apnea

Training Week 1:
Saturday:  38 minutes spinning and Upper Body strength training
Sunday:  1 hour of racquetball and 55 minutes (5 miles) running on the treadmill
Monday:  62 minutes (2300 meters) swimming

As I was swimming this morning I started thinking about some of the defining moments in my life.  I can't think too much while I am swimming or I lose count of my laps (I did 92), but the way I think about exercise has changed so dramatically in the last few days that I had to acknowledge this morning, somewhere around lap 50, that I am experiencing a defining moment in my life.  The other moment that popped into my head this morning, during my swim, was the surgery that I had to cure my sleep apnea which I mentioned in my post, yesterday.  So, even though these are seemingly unrelated topics, they are the two things I have decided to talk about today.

Athlete:  n.  a person trained or gifted in exercises or contests involving physical agility, stamina or strength; a participant in a sport, exercise, or game requiring physical skill.

Where this definition always lost me was in that one word, "gifted."  Well, that's a lie.  I think this is the first time I have actually looked up the word athlete.  But I have always thought of an athlete as someone that is gifted in a particular sport or who has a body type that seems well suited to a particular sport.  In my mind, these people had a leg-up or a head-start on people like me, who I have always considered to be slow and plodding and not particularly gifted at anything physical.

I missed that word, "or," which is in the first definition a few times.  A person trained or gifted in exercises or contests involving physical agility, stamina or strength.  OK, I'm not particularly gifted, but I am training.  I participate in exercise related events (though I have not thought of myself as a contestant...yet), and I may not be particularly agile, but I do have stamina and strength. 

These last few days I have been wrapping my mind around this statement, "I am an athlete."  The more I say it the more I like it and the more I know it is true.  This has profoundly changed my experience with exercise.  All of a sudden I am no longer exercising to burn calories, lose weight, to be in shape, or to "grow a little," but I am training.  I am training for a contest.  My first triathlon.  I have not figured out why that mind set makes a difference, but it does.  All of a sudden, this is more fun, a lot more fun.  As I was playing racquetball with Jack yesterday I was a lot less frustrated with not being able to win.  About halfway through our hour of play time I realized that my attitude about our racquetball playing had changed.  I was no longer seeing it as a game I needed to try to win, but I was seeing it as another form of training.  Racquetball is different from everything else I do.  It requires hand-eye coordination, responding to immediate conditions, sprinting and springing, attentiveness, and many other things.  It is skill building.  I want to beat Jack some day because I like to win, but yesterday I realized that he is another one of my coaches and by playing racquetball he is teaching me a whole new set of skills.  This was liberating.  It made playing so much more fun.

When I was in the pool today I didn't feel like I was slogging through my laps so that I could get on the scale and weigh less.  I felt like I was practicing for an event.  It was a completely different feeling.  Again, it was more fun.

I am an athlete.  I like the way that feels.  I am an athlete.  I am going to be saying that a lot, for a while.

Defining moment # 2 for this blog post:  Sleep apnea.  Sleep apnea is serious business.  Basically, sleep apnea is defined by a suspension of breathing for periods of time while you are sleeping.  It has all kinds of serious repercussions.  If a person has severe sleep apnea they never actually get into a deep sleep, they are always sleeping lightly and never getting to that REM place that you need to be to get good, relaxing, stress relieving, sleep.  Severe sleep apnea affects your weight because when you don't get enough sleep your body releases different chemicals that stimulate your appetite, so you eat more.  It affects your ability to deal effectively with stress because you are never asleep enough to truly relax.  It increases the risk of heart disease and other cardio-vascular related illnesses.  It makes you feel foggy all the time, you can;t quite put your finger on it, but you know you aren't as sharp as you should be. 

I had severe sleep apnea my entire life, since I was a little girl.  It was one of the things I was teased unmercifully about, my snoring.  I was a terrible snorer.  It must have been hell sleeping in the same room with me.  Even as a child I would stop breathing during the nights.  I remember my girl friends telling me that I freaked them out when I spent the night because I would stop breathing.  They thought I had died in my sleep.  A couple of them even went and got their parents, they were so scared.  I didn't realize, then, what a big deal this was.  I would fall asleep in class, a lot.  Teachers would embarrass me by slapping yardsticks on my desk to wake me up.  I would embarrass myself by snoring in class.  It was awful.

As an adult, my snoring was just as bad, if not worse.  When I was in college I went through two roommates before I found one that could sleep through my snoring.  I went down to the cafeteria one morning to find my roommate mocking my snoring and telling everyone how obnoxious I was.  It was humiliating.  Sleep apnea is often associated with being overweight, but I had sleep apnea when I was five years old and at a perfectly healthy weight, when I was 20 years old and weighed 135 pounds, when I was 40 years old and weighed 200 pounds.  My weight was not my problem, my throat was my problem.

When I was 40ish, I finally got tired of getting strep throat every time a child walked in the room, so I started talking to my doctor about getting my tonsils out to prevent future incidences of strep throat.  It was in that conversation that I mentioned the severe snoring.  He sent me to an ENT.  The first ENT he sent me to sucked, in my opinion.  He scoped my throat and nasal passages and acknowledged that I had over sized tonsils and adenoids.  He sent me for a sleep study.  He never called me back.  I finally called his office and they said, "Oh, yes, we have the results of your study here.  You have severe sleep apnea.  We want to send you back for a second study and have you wear a CPAP mask all night."  Well, that was not going to happen.  The first night I was there they tried to put a CPAP mask on me and I freaked out.  I got so claustrophobic I started to go into a panic attack.  You see, in addition to having sleep apnea, I can't breathe through my nose.  It turns out there are a couple of reasons for this.  First, I had excessive nasal tissue in my nasal passages.  Second, the "vents" on the side of my nose are too pronounced.  Your vents are where your nose goes from going down to flaring out.  When I breathe deeply through my nose, my vents collapse and block air from going through my nose.  (That was another thing I was teased for as a kid, breathing through my mouth.  I remember teaching myself to breathe through my nose when I was in 7th grade.  I had to consciously think about it and as long as I breathed lightly, I could breathe through my nose.  I would do OK until I took a test or did something that required concentration and then I would start heavy breathing through my mouth again.  Then the snickers and snide comments would start from the kids in the class.)  The CPAP mask was forcing me to breathe through my nose, which I couldn't do.  As soon as I realized the ENT had not read the sleep study and didn't know I couldn't breathe with the CPAP mask I knew I needed a different doctor.  I started asking around and found an excellent ENT.

When the second doctor examined me he did a much more thorough job.  He said that everything that could be wrong with me between the bridge of my nose and my Adam's apple was wrong.  From the vents that I discusses earlier, to huge tonsils and adenoids, to the angle between my chin and my Adam's apple.  He said that some of the things could be fixed and some couldn't.  The tonsils and adoids could come out.  The vents couldn't be fixed.  He warned me that surgery seldom cured sleep apnea but in my case he felt strongly that the tonsils and adenoids should come out anyway, and we would see what improvement that made.  So we did the surgery.  He removed my tonsils, adenoids, part of my soft palate, my uvula, and tissue from my nasal passages.  It was pretty extensive surgery.  My dad came out to stay with me and take care of me and the kids while I recovered.  He spent the night with me in the hospital that first night.  When I woke up the next morning I swear he was practically in tears he was so happy.  I asked him what was up and he told me that I slept peacefully all night.  That I did not snore at all.  The very first night after surgery and my sleep apnea was cured.  It really was.  I don't snore anymore.  I sleep soundly through the night.  My life has changed so dramatically it is almost impossible to describe.  That one decision, that decision to cure my sleep apnea, that one doctor, that amazing ENT, changed my life forever.  It has made a profound difference in my quality of life.  That decision 10 years ago was one of the first steps that allowed me to get to where I am today.  I believe that with all my heart and soul.

I know sleep apnea gets a lot of press today and maybe people don't take it seriously, but I hope this post will help you see what a big deal sleep apnea really is.  I will try to talk more about some of the changes it has made in my life tomorrow, I am running out of time, today.  But if you, or someone you know, snores severely and stops breathing at night, please get a sleep study done.  Curing sleep apnea is huge.  Please take it seriously.  A family member told me, "You just need to lose weight, you are crazy to get this surgery."  Well, yeah, I needed to lose weight, but I had sleep apnea my whole life.  I knew that the weight wasn't causing the sleep apnea.  It was more like the other way around. 

OK - I don't even have time to proof read and edit this post, which means it will have all kinds of grammatical errors in it.  But I want to get it up and I have to go to work.  I'll correct it later.

Have a great day.