Are you taking opioids and have excessive sleeping or tired all the time

Hi crazyhazeynut I was on oral opioid for a very long time and I was diagnosed with sleep apnea in January of 2007. There are several different types of sleep apnea, the most common is Obstructive sleep apnea, ( that is when your throat collapses in on its self and thus prevents air going to your lungs, think of your throat as a fire hose, as long as there is water pressure in the hose it stays round and inflated and water flows through it when the water is turned off the fire hose collapses!. Well with your throat when you sleep the muscles in your throat relax and if they relax to much the throat collapses and thus blocks off your air supply! When that happens your body goes into panic mode (just like if someone put a plastic bag over your head or strangled you) your lungs cant get any air, and this wakes you up just enough to cause your muscles in your throat to activate and the throat again opens and lets air pass through it and you start breathing again. With obstructive sleep apnea this will happen many many many time an hour and sometime last for close to a minute each time, and even though you might not remember waking up, your body does and it never has a chance to reach REM sleep which is the deep healing sleepy your body needs to function.. So your tired all the time! What CPAP does is it increases the air pressure in your throat and airways by constantly blowing air into you thus keep your throat from collapsing and thus you breath while your sleeping. Obstructive Sleep apnea is the most common form of sleep apnea.

Now for people that use opioid drugs, these medications can cause another type of sleep apnea, which is known as Central Apneas this is caused when your brain, literally quits telling you breath. Congestive heart failure, can also cause central apneas as well as brain stem or upper spinal cord damage, and certain neurological diseases! There is also an idiopathic form of central apneas which there is no know cause for them, Anyway central apneas are usually not effectively treated with normal CPAP and BiPAP machines, they usually take a ASV machine to effectively treat them, ASV means Adaptive Servo Ventilator, it looks like a CPAP machine and is used the same way, but the machine is much more expensive and is actually a ventilator and it actually helps you breath while you sleep!

The third type of sleep apnea is Complex sleep apnea, and this is a combination of Obstructive sleep apnea and Central Sleep Apnea, the treatment for this is also usually the ASV machine.

When I was first diagnosed with sleep apnea back in January 2007 I was put on CPAP and it did not help me in fact it was making things worse over a period of a year and a half, I had five in lab sleep studies done, and went from using CPAP to BIPAP and BIPAP with oxygen and numerous pressure changes, none of which helped. I finally changed sleep doctors, and he immediately had me do a ASV titration sleep study and then put me on the ASV machine that was in May of 2008. As soon as I was put on this machine, within two weeks my drenching nights sweat stopped completely and I no longer was getting up every hour or two to go to the bathroom. and most of all within just a few weeks I was no longer falling asleep during the day or feeling tired all the time. Before I was treated twice I fell asleep while driving, and was extremely luckily I did not get in an accident. It is really scary waking up driving your car in the media of a interstate highway parallel to the road going 65 mph !

I am a very big advocate of PAP and treating sleep apnea. You don't have to be an overweight, middle age male to have sleep apnea, it can strike anyone at any age, male or female, under weight average weight and over weight! Also you don't have to snore like a buzz saw to have it either! So I encourage anyone who is tired all the time and or has night sweats, and or goes to the bathroom every hour or two during the night, and is tired and never feel rested, go to your doctor and get checked out! In the end it could save your life, or somebody else's that might share the road with you!

Sleep apnea can contribute to diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke and heart attack and host of other diseases and problems. A good site for information on sleep apnea is; http://sleepapnea.org/index.html


White Beard

Crazy-did your sinuses only plug up at night or when u went to bed? Whitebeard-I'm curious about your night sweats. How long did u have them?

1 day at a time I had night sweats for years and years and I mean drench the bed from head to toe change your bed cloths and linen night sweats! And some night having to do it two or three times a night depending on your tolerance on sleeping in soaking wet sheets! Ihad been to many doctors about the night sweats one swore up and down iI had lymphoma! Plus I was tired all the time. But nobody recognized it as a symptom of sleep apnea! Heck (I. swear this happened to me and this is true) A urologist even scoped my bladder because of my nocturia (frequent trips to the bathroom at night) but found nothing wrong! Both of these are common symptoms of sleep apnea!

When I had my posterior fusion at C3/4 I could not use my PAp mask because of the staples going down the middle of the back of my neck ( Ihad 47 of them). within two days all my sleep apnea symptoms returned the nocturia, night sweats, the sleep apnea fog that your in because of sleep deprivation all of it returned!!. Heck one night in the hospital for that surgery they actually change my bed linen and gown three times in one night because I was literally drenched from the night sweats! I was miserable as I couldn't use my ASV PAP machine for over two weeks untill they removed the staples!

As soon as I was able to again use my ASV PAP machine the symptoms promptly went away! The sleep apnea fog takes a bit longer to fade but usually only a couple of weeks. But please note as simple as this treatment is for sleep apnea ( what's any more simpler? you wear some type of mask attached to a hose tthat's attached to a machine that blows air into you) but the realty of it, is it can be extremely difficult to adjust too and it has an extremely high failure rate because people won't or refuse to use it!!! The best way to adjust to it is force yourself to use it every night all night long when you sleep! Determination, Persistence, and Perseverance, (patience) and Attitude (if you think you can use it, you can! ) is what will get you through and make your treatment successful! The PAP machine will become your best buddy and sleeping companion at night and in the process just might save your life! ( my O2 saturation levels were going down in the sixties and staying there for over 30 seconds at a time because of my severe sleep apnea!) My doctor told me if I didn't use my machine at night when I slept it was not a question of "if" but only a question of " when" I would die in my sleep of a heart attack or stroke caused by my sleep apnea! For me that's a pretty good incentive to always use my machine!

White Beard