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The benefits of nocturnal oxygen
As a result of his diagnosis of sleep apnoea/apnea Husband has acquired a CPAP machine for a trial. He's had it for nearly a week now and the results look very promising.
There have been teething problems as you'd expect from introducing a cyborg into our lives. He's on to his second nasal attachment, a hose-up-the-nose which he finds less invasive than the nose-only oxygen mask that was trialled first. He accidentally removed it early this morning because he thought it was time to get up, then slept on, but I'm not too worried about that. He's getting used to it.
It's really quiet, which is impressive. Quiet unless one fails to seal one of the compartments and then it spontaneously squeals like a pig caught in a vacuum cleaner. I think we've all been there; another lesson learned. Although the normal operational sound is low volume it's complex and pitched differently to the usual background sounds and my own tinnitus. It is a bit Darth Vadery, if Darth Vader were inclined to don a frilly apron and vacuum the carpet in the next room for hours on end. (It frightens me a little bit that someone might google "Darth Vader frilly apron" one day, but I guess that's what fanfic is for.)
I'm in the process of breaking the habit of listening to Husband breathe, and I'm working on not listening to the machine work. Husband didn't tell me that it was set to ramp from zero to working pressure over 15 minutes, so I heard the machine operating at insufficient pressure. He didn't do anything wrong and I was theoretically right but now I know.
The main problem is that I've had practice at listening to and monitoring the breathing of someone on a CPAP machine. Someone who died because their breathing failed :-(
Fortunately the thing neither beeps nor goes ping.
The other problem, and one which I had not anticipated at all, was that Husband no longer sounded like Husband. I can't say that I missed the snoring, but the new regulated breathing pattern set off all kinds of Warning! Stranger! alerts, which is a little tricky to sleep next to in the dark. More than that, my accursed brain absorbed the hospital memories and decided that Husband was some kind of ventilated coma patient and/or zombie stranger. Even better, he's been quite tense and not up for any reassuring contact, so I had Mustn't Touch! alerts going off as well. We've only got a double bed, so there's not much room to relax if you're trying to respect borders.
Sweet dreams everyone.
Still, we learn to adapt, and it's going to be worth the effort. I'm beginning to hear Husband's personality again in his new breathing pattern, and have thankfully stopped listening quite so hard. Husband has respectfully requested that I stop referring to him as zombie corpse man, and in that spirit the CPAP machine has been christened the Super Happy Terrific Fun Machine. I'm not really keen to assign a name or separate personality to something that now shares my bedroom. I've been married a long time. That doesn't really explain Boris The Shark with whom I sleep every night (and day *sigh*), but he's cuddly and from IKEA so that's OK.
There have been teething problems as you'd expect from introducing a cyborg into our lives. He's on to his second nasal attachment, a hose-up-the-nose which he finds less invasive than the nose-only oxygen mask that was trialled first. He accidentally removed it early this morning because he thought it was time to get up, then slept on, but I'm not too worried about that. He's getting used to it.
It's really quiet, which is impressive. Quiet unless one fails to seal one of the compartments and then it spontaneously squeals like a pig caught in a vacuum cleaner. I think we've all been there; another lesson learned. Although the normal operational sound is low volume it's complex and pitched differently to the usual background sounds and my own tinnitus. It is a bit Darth Vadery, if Darth Vader were inclined to don a frilly apron and vacuum the carpet in the next room for hours on end. (It frightens me a little bit that someone might google "Darth Vader frilly apron" one day, but I guess that's what fanfic is for.)
I'm in the process of breaking the habit of listening to Husband breathe, and I'm working on not listening to the machine work. Husband didn't tell me that it was set to ramp from zero to working pressure over 15 minutes, so I heard the machine operating at insufficient pressure. He didn't do anything wrong and I was theoretically right but now I know.
The main problem is that I've had practice at listening to and monitoring the breathing of someone on a CPAP machine. Someone who died because their breathing failed :-(
Fortunately the thing neither beeps nor goes ping.
The other problem, and one which I had not anticipated at all, was that Husband no longer sounded like Husband. I can't say that I missed the snoring, but the new regulated breathing pattern set off all kinds of Warning! Stranger! alerts, which is a little tricky to sleep next to in the dark. More than that, my accursed brain absorbed the hospital memories and decided that Husband was some kind of ventilated coma patient and/or zombie stranger. Even better, he's been quite tense and not up for any reassuring contact, so I had Mustn't Touch! alerts going off as well. We've only got a double bed, so there's not much room to relax if you're trying to respect borders.
Sweet dreams everyone.
Still, we learn to adapt, and it's going to be worth the effort. I'm beginning to hear Husband's personality again in his new breathing pattern, and have thankfully stopped listening quite so hard. Husband has respectfully requested that I stop referring to him as zombie corpse man, and in that spirit the CPAP machine has been christened the Super Happy Terrific Fun Machine. I'm not really keen to assign a name or separate personality to something that now shares my bedroom. I've been married a long time. That doesn't really explain Boris The Shark with whom I sleep every night (and day *sigh*), but he's cuddly and from IKEA so that's OK.