Sleep apnea sucks. It sucks out your energy, your patience, your tolerance for change (small or large), and your ability to brain.

As you may already know, sleep apnea causes you to stop breathing several times during the night. Some stop several hundred times. Each time, your body goes into panic survival mode. Adrenaline is excreted, the heart races, and your body does everything it can to survive – to get you breathing again. So, imagine juicing your body with tiny shots of adrenaline anywhere between twenty and several hundred times per night, and then falling immediately back to sleep. How often would someone reach, let alone stay in, that restful deep sleep?

I’ve been repeatedly diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. It’s not far off to say that I can’t remember many nights of good sleep. I can’t remember not being tired every minute of every day. I have a CPAP machine, but it’s not been the miracle I was hoping for. The mask fits great. The pressure ramps up to where it’s supposed to be, but still allows me to exhale. The humidifier attachment mostly works. And yet I find myself removing the mask night after night. Most of the time, I don’t remember doing it. For a while, I didn’t wear it because it freaked Acelyn out while we were co-sleeping. After she started sleeping up in her room, I’d forget to put it back on after a midnight feeding. Now that she’s sleeping the whole night through, I don’t really have an excuse. I’m still taking the mask off. Night before last, I caught myself doing it because my mouth was dry. I got up, drank some water, and put the mask back on. I went to sleep thinking that I’d finally made some headway.

I woke up with the mask off.

And I woke up exhausted to my core. It was so bad that Nikki suggested I take a nap while the kids were sleeping, and I did. Two and a half hour nap, and it helped a little. Went to sleep with the mask on, woke up with it off. If I can only convince myself to wear it through the night regularly, I’m certain I’ll experience the benefits. In the mean time, I need to convince my sleeping self to just leave the damn mask on.