Picture 041028-whole-night

This is the overview of my whole night at the sleep lab. Unfortunately, I opted not to take the sleeping pill, as I was pretty tired. I should have known better, because any time I have to go to sleep, I can't. It didn't help that they wanted me to sleep on my back, which I've never liked to do.

Anyway, so the square blocky black line that says "wake" to the left is showing what state of sleep I'm in. Even with the word "wake" is awake; the lower the line the deeper the sleep. The blue line is where it would be for REM, which I only got about 15 minutes of a little after 7am. The two patches of light sleep from 5ish to 5:30ish and 6ish until I woke up just after 7 were the only two periods where I felt the sleep was somewhat normal --- I tend to sleep for an hour to hour and a half, wake up, look at the clock, maybe make a quick trip to the bathroom and then back to sleep immediately.

The red spiky line below is marking when the brain does a "transient arousal". No, not that kind of arousal ;-) that's when it wakes up enough to make the airway open up so I can breathe. The green line below that is the blood oxygen --- you can see the more the sleep, the less oxygen there is. Next are little tic marks noting the number and type of Apnea events (what they call "hypopnia"s). Below that is the key line for one of the goals here: stopping snoring. But in fact, I didn't actually snore that much. Of course, I didn't really sleep that much either ;-)

Not much leg movement, but the next squarish line is marking the position I was in. I tried sleeping on my back for far too long, though when it says "up", well, their sensor doesn't work all that well. I sleep best on my left side though, and that helped a lot. Plus, I think around 3:30 to 4:00, the attendant noticed I was getting hot (took the covers off) and brought in a fan. Mostly that helped from a white noise perspective, as dead quiet makes little noises stand out much more, and if there's anything that will keep me awake, it's little random noises.

Finally, my heartrate. It should be a relatively flat line, with just a little noise, but where it's really thick is because whenever the brain does a little wakeup, it gooses the heart with a little adrenalin too. Can't be good...