Being stabbed with a needle sounds a lot more pleasant than a sleep study.

Sleep studies are a bit of a pain in the ass, but the time I've invested in getting my sleep problems figured has been one of the highest ROI of most anything medical I've put myself through, including my cleft lip repair. I love my sleep doctor. They are crazy smart. They do a 5 to 7 year residency after med school. 3 - 4 years medicine. 1-2 years critical care/pulmonary fellowship. 1-2 year sleep medicine fellowship. They are generally happy doctors, because they have a pretty good lifestyle (High billing rate, 9 to 5 work week without call.) as opposed to other high end specialties like Cardiology, Intensivists, etc..

So, the sleep study is the unpleasant bit. Just be sure that you go to a sleep clinic in the richest neighborhood around. You'll get the best trained doctors and the happiest staff working for them. (Most of their patients have good health insurance).

re: Symptoms of Obstructive Sleep Apnea:

What you are describing is narcolepsy, which can indeed be a byproduct of sever obstructive sleep apnea. If you go to a sleep doctor, they will give you a battery of tests like "sleepiness scales", basic tests for depression, questions about your sleep patterns, etc... People with Severe sleep apnea (and concomitant narcolepsy) will fall asleep at very inopportune times. My wife's grandfather was notorious for falling asleep mid sentence. He died of Congestive heart failure.

I never fell asleep during conversations, but the likelihood of falling asleep on a long car ride when my wife was driving was extremely high. I'd also struggle to stay awake while watching TV with my wife in a dark room, and I'd occasionally fall asleep in a movie theater. I had always chalked my sleepiness to working the night shift for years.

The best symptom: Your wife tells you that you stop breathing when you sleep. :)

You're not going to notice much, because you are the proverbial frog in the kettle. You have been slowly adjusting to decreased oxygen levels, and increasing periods of hypopnea (under breathing) or apea (stop breathing) for years. As I said, I had chalked it up to working nights for years. It wasn't until my sleep disturbances really became severe, and my sleep pattern started interfering with work that I went to the doctor.

That being said, I was completely stunned with the results of my first sleep study. As a critical care nurse, I routinely intubate people (put them on a ventilator/life support) when their oxygen saturation (percentage of hemoglobin saturated with oxygen) goes down to 80%. Normal is 95 to 100%, and there's an exponential decay (read patients get much sicker much quicker ) after O2 Sats drop below 90 - 92%. [1]

I almost crapped my pants, when my doctor told me that my Oxygen Saturation routinely dropped into the mid 80's and the lowest it got was 82%. Meaning, that if I were a patient in my ER, and having symptoms of difficulty breathing, I would want to put myself on life support if those numbers sustained themselves.

Needless to say, I got busy and started to take care of things. What's amazed me most, is how much better I can focus on programming now. I'm also a lot "sharper" now, even though I never would have thought I was fuzzy before treatment.

re: nursing.

send me an email, and I'll be glad to tell you the story. This thread is getting a little too off topic. :)

Besides, I gotta run out the door and catch a plane.

ref:

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Oxyhaemog...