Obstrutive Sleep Apnea

Heather Rice

Jeffrey Cahan

College Writing (CUL-221624-01-11SU2)

June 18, 2011

Health, Family and Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Loss of sleep, or quality of sleep, can make everyday situations appear larger than they are. Morning comes, and the alarm clock starts ringing, but the body does not want to heed the call. This leads us to reach for the snooze button once, twice and again. Finally, after stalling, we are able to pull ourselves out of bed. In the family room, we find our spouse asleep on the couch for the third time this week. The adrenaline hits, and we race around getting ready because now we are late. The kids, who were difficult this morning, are off to school. We head off to work. The day is typical; everyone and everything rubs us the wrong way. At home, we can barely keep our eyes open throughout dinner, and breathe a sigh of relief when we finally crawl into bed. Time starts to pass as we lay there waiting to drift off. After tossing and turning, and a few bathroom trips, we fall asleep only to be woken up by our spouse telling us that we are snoring and to turn over. Before we know it, morning comes, and yesterday repeats. This is a typical day for a person suffering from untreated Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA). The symptoms and resulting health issues of OSA affect us, our family, our health and our quality of life but with medical treatment and a few lifestyle changes OSA can be managed.

During sleep, a person with OSA can experience pauses of breath as little as five times a minute or hundreds of times an hour. In a web page, the American Sleep Apnea Association (ASAA) describes OSA as “a blockage of the airway, usually when the soft tissue in the rear of the throat collapses and closes during sleep”. This blockage restricts the amount of air taken in which results in low levels of oxygen in the blood and brain. In the United States, it is estimated, that over twelve million Americans suffer from OSA.

There is...