The Sandy Hahn Podcast Episode 3: Sleep Apnea

[Music] okay welcome back to the third episode of the sandy han podcast and this one's going to be titled sleep apnea and sleep apnea sucks a bag of dicks and it just does um so over getting a lot of that that i've dealt with and still continue to deal with with the sleep apnea on a cpap machine so um but before i get into that i want to talk about a few of the things i noticed after being able to watch the first podcast that ted was kind enough to send to me and a few things i noticed was uh first off that my nose was very red and as you can see from the band-aid on my nose uh it's from the cpap mask that that i have to put on which i hate and it aggravates my skin uh you know started a a few zits quite honestly which of course i have to pop and then they become formed together and form make one giant zit and then it gets infected it's nasty and uh so that's why the band-aid because you don't want to see this yet and one of the other things i noticed was that i was slouched over i was in a comfy chair and made me look a little chubby and it's not good for my back so i'm sitting in a much firmer chair and that feels a lot better and third thing i noticed was that um i'm going to try and be more upbeat and humorous that's why i always am but after watching the first two you know there's a few funny parts but uh it's pretty heavy there's some deep stuff and and there's gonna be a lot more deep stuff that we get into some pretty horrible but i'm gonna do my best to remain upbeat and trying to inject more humor because that's what i've always done my whole life so the and it's actually can be fairly easy for me to be upbeat because uh i feel better and i know it's because this podcast i felt better last week um i was walking better i was talking better and it's all i could think about and all weekend so it's it's therapeutic honestly that that's the main reason i wanted to do this and i can't and it's working it's helping me and it's that part's exciting so it's uh and when i say feel better i want to talk about feeling good and feeling better because they are very different for me than i would say most people because the majority of the time i i don't feel great i don't feel good i either feel okay or bad or horrible and it it goes back and forth and varies and it's day-to-day still is i have no idea what's gonna come on it just does and it's awful but in a lot of the days before uh there was a lot of bad a lot of horrible occasioning okay and i'm okay with being okay i can live like this i'd like to get better and keep trying but it certainly beats out of feeling horrible and feel like you're gonna die so but even even now as good as i felt at the end of the week on the weekend i did not sleep real good and it's a combination of this mask that i can't stand and congestion i i don't know if my allergies it's hard to to breathe my nose which is pretty impossible to use a mask when you do that and the other reason widenessly because like my mind i couldn't stop it was racing because i was thinking about all more things i want to talk about because again it's therapeutic i want to keep talking about this as long as i can because it's helping me and i hope when others see this they'll want to watch more because they'll know that they can heal them and again that's the uh the main reason for doing this so anyway i'll uh so again we'll get back to this giant zit uh from the cpap mask um actually we'll we'll get back to that but i'm going to start this one uh with the summer of 2020 kind of where i left off on the second episode and summer of 2020 uh again i was i stopped doing the holistic medicine uh seeing the holistic doctors or they they decided to do a thing so um i was still searching but i was again feeling okay not great but it's okay actually started to play try and play golf again which i didn't think i was going to ever do again but i did it wasn't pretty but i did it and my wife and i were going to plan on going to northern michigan which we love it's absolutely beautiful up there um like denver sunshine state um okay there's my first temper humor that's the movie old school which is genius so if you haven't watched it uh go and look look at watch that i am going to try and again slip more humor into this i do that a lot of times with funny lines from movies and tv shows uh that i think it's amusing but so summer 2020 was early summer and we were planning to go to north michigan and prior to us leaving a day or two my son had come back from college this is when covid was really kicking in and he had they were home from school and then he actually went back to school just to uh get a stuff they left and when he came back he realized that he was exposed to some kids down there who had coveted and he came home and got tested and he was positive so thankfully we weren't really near him that much at that point but uh we decided that we had to tell my brother-in-law tr his girlfriend kelly who have a beautiful house on burt lake in michigan which we love going to and you had to tell them where we it's possible we were exposed and so we're looking we can't go and later that day you know they want us to come up and we wanted to go but we're trying to do the right thing and be safe and then he said okay my in-laws john and carol apple who are lovely people love them very much they also have a place up north and they weren't there so he thought well you guys can come up here stay at their place so we're separate and we're only 20 20 minutes away so we could just drive over hang out in their backyard by fire and go by the on the dock and still enjoy ourselves but we just weren't gonna stay in the house for obvious reasons so we we did that and it was nice it's beautiful up there and it was good to get away and let xander quarantine and uh israel was complaining because she wanted to get get the hell out of there and go stay somewhere else but thankfully she was a good sister and and stayed behind in order to feed him and bring him meals she would i think hang on the basement she'd bring him water and meals leave him by his front door everybody bedroom door and so we could survive so that worked out okay and we were up north and it was it's good beautiful and then pretty shortly after you got there uh i started uh not feeling so good and it was mainly sleep if i don't sleep well i am a disaster uh the next day especially with this disease it's just it's hard to function so i first few days we're okay and then then it wasn't and i was having a hard time sleeping and i would wake up four or five times a night gasping for air i couldn't breathe my heart was facing i had chest pains uh it was awful and that happened one night i'm like right deal with it and it happened three nights in a row and i wasn't sleeping i was terrified and the next day i had to ask my wife to bring me to the er because i didn't feel good and some was wrong i mean i was saying noah's sick but needed to get checked out so she brought me in and spent a little time in the er which is never fun but i needed a test they took blood uh blood pressure ekg all that stuff and basically said my heart's good and which is great to hear but again it's amazing what anxiety and depression can do to make you feel like you're having a heart attack so i knew it was sleep apnea probably had it for a long time and just never wanted to deal with it especially going into my little sleep studies i'd signed up for one and i'm like yeah i'm going to do that so went uh went home or stopped at a cvs i got like a mouth guard um thought that maybe that would help and it did for a little bit it wasn't great but i wasn't waking up gasping for air so that was good so we were up there for about a month and you know again it was okay and then finally came back home and tried to set up a sleep study which is pain in the ass that took up probably a month just to get the study done so in the meantime i'm not sleeping great but again it's okay with this mouth guard and during that time i remember that's when i called my neurologist and said uh i want to try that carbidopa levodopa oopaloopa drug and cause you know if there's a chance it could help i'll take it um if it's not i'll stop but let's give it a shot so he gave me that and some muscle relaxers started taking those and they started helping i'm out of time but a little bit and i'll take a little bit every day so that was helping and then it was finally time for me to do the sleep study which that was interesting because uh they put you into a hotel the cleveland clinic you know has a wing in the back of this hotel near our house they'll go back and spend the night and i didn't know what to expect but uh you know i'm i'm a guy so i'm thinking i get to uh the night alone in hotel room and let's just say i had my own plans and i was not planning on being the master of my domain and for any of you who don't know what that's about look up seinfeld and look up that episode probably one of the best ones um let's just say it's a topic that they didn't want to say on tv but they had a brilliant job larry david is brilliant and he did a great job so anyway look it up it's funny but so and i had plans and i brought some gummies and a bottle of wine with me i'm like i'm gonna have a time until i got there and those planes were quickly squelched because you walk in and there's rooms there's one room that's just full of computers and monitors to monitor the other rooms so i'm in this room and i'm being videotaped and listening and so obviously i'm not doing anything stupid so those plans again were squelched pretty quickly and they said okay we're going to let you relax a little bit and then they're going to come in and hook me up with all kinds of monitors all over me somebody can hardly move once all the stuff was on me and you know they were gonna get started with with one mask and prior to that again i could a little time to relax so i took some gummies drank some wine got in the mood and then of course it's hard to sleep when you're tied up you know all these monitors it's hard to move and then they said okay what mask do you want because i didn't know so there's a mask that goes over your whole nose and mouth and there's one that goes just under your nose so i thought all right let's try that one tried that one and uh didn't work um they came in after 15 minutes were like oh yeah this is not going to work because you're you beat through your mouth and this one's not going to work so they gave me the one that goes over my nose and mouth and okay trying to sleep which it's hard to do when you know you're being videotaped and and they're talking to you and they can hear me if i need anything which is nice and that's i guess how it should be so i fell asleep i guess eventually because in the morning you know they get you up at like 5 30 6 a.m and kick your ass out and i don't ever get up that early in the morning if i'm not that early choose because i haven't gone to bed the night before i did that a lot but they kind of came in and said woo yeah you guys leave happening all right that was pretty bad and basically they said i would have an episode i said call it when you stop breathing or start gasping and you you know have an episode and they said basically i was having an episode pretty much uh every minute so you know throughout an hour i every minute i'm having an episode so it's like once you fall asleep it's like somebody watches you after a minute and they come and go wake up it's horrible so anyway i i dealt with that went home finally got the the mask and it was uh that was another ordeal and trying to get used to that and i'm still struggling with it to this day obviously you can see from the band-aid on my nose so i'm going to try some other things out uh there's some other option that i saw a commercial far called inspire wellness or inspire sleep some sort of metal or if some something is inserted or surgically uh minor a little surgery and then it does something an electrical impulse to keep your keep reading keep your mouth from or your tongue from closing off your airways i i don't know i i'm done but i'm gonna look into it because like i hate this mask and i told you that i'll try back to the ones under the nose because the one over the nose is just a disaster so uh i was i tried i was excited to have it and i couldn't figure out how tight to make the mask i just didn't like it and and when you're you turn it on it's just blowing air into your mouth and you know pretty quickly you know my mouth's dry i mean i dry dry mouth a lot as it is like right now and so you'd wake up you know it's not working i'm gasping and choking cause that mouse dry and i just would rip it off and throw it at the wall and wasn't happy kept trying and my dad has been using machine and he swears by it and i just wanted to sleep and he had a head strap to keep your mouth shut i tried that didn't work and i found these laments xyla melts that you stick and those actually work for looks it keeps your saliva going while you sleep and those work for a little while and but i still wasn't sleeping very good and and then of course the first megazit appeared and i was so nice to me i couldn't wear the mask i just slept without it for a while to try and recover and then got past that and i started wearing band-aids on my nose when i slept i think there's some other things out there which i need to look into uh maybe some sort of i don't know lotion or gel that i could put on there that uh could do better but again i'd rather not even wear that mask so uh we'll see where where that goes and how that develops but i finally so this was the time i got this was december around there 2020 and kind of started to get the hang of it and it was okay again it's never great but sort of kind of getting the hang of it here and there so the uh i still kept looking for other options because there's got to be something else and so if anyone knows if anything else it's worked well for sleep apnea outside of the mask please let me know again i have other my dad and some other good friends who use it and they love it and i wish i loved it but i don't so that was the end of 2020 and actually went on a real nice trip then my wife and kids and tiara and kelly and their kids went to cabo in mexico for christmas new year's and it was glorious um but i had you know lugging that machine along and getting distilled water in mexico that's an audio one of the other times i went to mexico and needed distilled water my wife tried to order some and like i doubt they're going to happen of course they didn't but then they found some and they delivered to our room [Music] and it was about a 50 gallon drum of distilled water i'm like okay are you kidding me we just need like a gallon or a half gallon but that's what we had to deal with so she uh it's a trooper and we that's all we had so she just leaned it over and fill a little cup up with some water distilled water to pour in the machine but that that's some funny stories about that because this i couldn't move very well and she's a strong woman but uh it's a big 50 gallon drum of just all water so anyway we got through it and so now um we're moving into the early part of 2021 last year and what a rollercoaster that was and again it's a lot of horrible times but some great times too and uh we'll go through all that the the next episode um is going to be called signs of hope and the reason there are signs of hope because um we'll go into some more detail in the next one but i was feeling okay i started playing golf again and i actually was playing pretty good not great but i used to be a pretty good golfer i could shoot in a high 60s low 70s a lot i can't do that anymore but you know i was shooting in the 80s which a lot of people would like to do but can but i still didn't like that but it was just nice to be out golfing and actually playing decent and be able to to walk it was difficult a lot of places i hit the ball i couldn't go to but you know my brother who i was playing with just pull it out because i threw it somewhere that was flat um and i wasn't that concerned about the score wasn't playing for money and they just wanted to have fun and i did and i i hope for those kind of moments again i i believe i can have them i believe they will um i even played last month down in florida and i would say i played a role in the golf cart hit a few shots but i i hit it and that's was an amazing sign for me again i just take any little victories here and there any day just to give me some faith to keep keep fighting and it can be difficult very difficult but i'm not giving up and anyone who's watching this or listening don't give up so that'll be the end of the third episode and a lot more coming and i'm excited about it it's gonna be fun and it's healing me again i already feel it right now and i'm excited to do a lot more and looking forward to it thanks everyone [Music]

Channel: The Sandy Hahn Podcast

Views: 274

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Id: _iujGO0MMBY

Length: 28min 15sec (1695 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022