Sleep Apnea

Oh how it has been so long.

I couldn't sleep tonight. I remember spending many nights like this, where I could not get the thoughts out of my head without sitting down banging keys on the keyboard. Lately, these troubled nights are directly connected to an illness that I have developed which this post is titled after.

I know many people suffer from this illness, but I also know that every case is unique in how a person can cope with it, how they live when dealing with it. For me, this illness is destroying who I am, who I know myself to be. It's starting with my body, working it's way through my healthy life, pushing me faster into aging, into obesity.

I've done things to try and fight this, and I will do things to fight this, but I have such a case as it will take extraordinary dedication and courage of will to shape my choices and decisions around overcoming this illness. I have nights where I feel like it is going to take my life before I can fix it. Tonight feels like one of those worrisome nights.

I know that it is worry that drives that feeling more than the symptoms, but the symptom of suffocating yourself awake just by trying to breathe during the first part of sleep is about as close as most people could ever imagine being to a near death experience.

If someone came up to you when you were asleep and held their hand over your mouth and cut off your air till it woke you up, the first thing you would feel is like someone is trying to kill you. That is the feeling you get without the threat of another persons action when you wake up from this illness. Your heart is racing, your adrenaline pumping, and your feeling and thoughts dazed and shocked.

This is the nightmare that is an illness that gets dismissed by millions of patients doctors every single day. They send you home with a imperfect solution, tell you it will help, and watch as you fight your own body to sleep. When you tell them something is wrong the next time you see them, they make you sleep in a room that is reminiscent of a nightmare scene in older resident evil games, only to use a $10,000.00 super precise, highly adjustable sleep machine to gauge your sleep apnea events. They then translate that into a number that is prescribed to your failing cheap home machine which more often than not doesn't help for much more than a couple of days.

I have been through many well slept, observed sleep studies, only to go home and face this same ugly issue consistently for months at a time before a doctor can try to adjust my machine by an unhelpful margin. It leaves me feeling frustrated, broken, and chips away at my motivation and faith that I can conquer this sickness.

I am venting here, because I have no one to vent this to without feeling it come back on me as some kind of attack on others close to me. I have become a functioning part of a relationship that does not reciprocate any kind of comfort back to me when I feel these frustrations. They are always taken as if I am blaming someone else, when I know I'm not. I want to express my feelings to get them free of my mind, but they constantly remain trapped because the person I am closest to, feels as though I blame them for this even though I know it is completely my own problem. I created this by working harder than those around me, only to find that when the work was unavailable or taken from me afterwards, that my body rejected the change of pace by giving me weight to try and store up goods for another laborious round of working life which has yet to ever arrive.

I'd love to be in a gym everyday, watching my health transform back into this sculptured human being, and feeling that confidence that comes from doing something positive and challenging. Being a father of two children, and having less money than the problems that I pay to hold at bay makes that a distant goal. Sometimes I think about just paying my rent late and paying for a membership but I know that would only get me evicted from my home.

These are the kinds of mental challenges you face when having to manage a life with sleep apnea while also dealing with the challenges of being a breadwinner in a family of four living breathing beautiful people.

I love my family! I would die for and kill for this family. I would change the world with even an inch of power to keep them safe and bring them as close to perfect happiness as they could reach. That love is the only thing that has kept me alive during this illness. I wake up clutching onto the fingers of my wife to be, and my beautiful baby girl just to know that, my nightmare is tolerable to keep them warm, clothed, fed, and safe.

I fear and feel sad for the people who go through this who don't have little hands to hang on to at night, or who don't have so much to drive them. This illness can and more than likely does have the power to make someone give up their life to end the suffering it brings. If I didn't love the Lord or my family, I would have probably given up my life for this feeling to stop.

I hope that someone else finds this and realizes that they are not alone in understanding the maddening nature of this sickness, and that you are not alone in the fight to try to break free of this nightly torment.

I'm here to tell you that I know I will, and I know that you can too, and tonight is one of my bad nights, and despite that frustration, that feeling of tension in my arms and legs from the shortness of breath, and lack of oxygen that I was aroused from, that you and I both can conquer this one sleepless battle after another. There will be a cure, and there will be chances to fight this. Just keep your hopes high, and your pursuit of sleep constant! Our bodies may fail us, but our minds are what make us stronger than the weaknesses we develop!

Goodnight Sleepless Ones!

LatZ

Nondirection

I have waited a long time to do this.

I haven't been able to write about things that circulate through my thoughts in so long that it feels like it has been eating me alive.

I used to write on a blog site called Opendiary.com

I had many friends on there, and I could write and hear the thoughts of others without discrimination from a biased view from being a part of my real life.

I'm more depressed than I have ever been. Life has been a pursuit of success with a long list of failed attempts. I realize you have to quit to fail, but I have felt the draw of allure to the idea of quitting, because the simplicity of the answer stands solid.

I'm better than that in my own belief. I feel that I carry so much of a burden for the worries of what I would leave undone and behind me, that there isn't a way for me to just cut ties to this world. You throw in the bargain basket of being a Christian losing his passage to heaven because of his weakness for drama in life, and you got a bad recipe for guilt of an unchangeable action.

Honestly, I look forward in hope for better times than these. I live surrounded by talk of the end of the world in countless different possibilities. I live in the presence of the end times biblically, and yet, life is full of ways it could end on it's own without a big grand scheme ending.

I am at this moment depressed because I have a daughter, who I feel like I've failed just by bringing her into this world with a woman who holds hatred for me, simply for the fact that I complicate her life by demanding responsibility for our child. It's a backwards ass world when you gotta leave your kid with the irresponsible parent for a system broken in judgement by choices of a past culture dragged to the current times.

I am fighting legal battles in 3 different areas of my life, and then I threw the icing on the cake when I decided to start dating a girl because she has an insane face value cover to desire after. The girl is insanely beautiful. There's things about her character that you cannot help but want. She is smart, clever, funny, beautiful, witty, professional and crafty, and capable, as well as responsible, respectful, and well loved by those around her. What does that translate into when I get thrown in the picture? Complicated.

Apparently I've discovered that I'm in her words "Lovey Dovey" and it kills me that she just went from on to off without so much as a sign to go by. I know I've heard a thousand times (quite possible that it could be a literal figure by now.) that women are crazy. I know that three days before hearing it, she told me that her mother said she had never seen a man look at her how I do. She shared photos and stories with me. She is the one who initiated getting comfortable, holding hands, caressing, and getting comfortable and romantic on our last day together. So... where does a few text messages telling her that I missed her company, and a goodnight with literally a couple xx's and oo's translate to lovey dovey?

It sucks... because she just started giving me the one liner brush off messages over this idea that I'm somehow being too soft. I mean, I'm not triple H but I definitely am not soft by any means. I figured I was being more along the lines of pleasant and sweet, being as how well things were going between us, so to have it thrown out there in a different light, just wrecked my happy little joyride in the midst of so much stress.

It doesn't hold any water that I'm lovey dovey in that sense, cause I'm a fucking game nerd. I play video games and sports. I'm not writing poems and painting walls for fun. I'm shooting people in Modern Warfare and calling 15 year old trash talkers little homebag bitches cause I can. Fuck if being a nicer guy cause I feel good about someone is a bad thing, maybe I should join the throngs of people who take pride in being dicks.

I got enough problems in my life, I really don't need another one. 99 problems but a bitch ain't one. I was fucking close to that pity fo sho!