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Article #51

I am a 56-year-old, married pharmacist. In 1988, I moved to Florida, intending to start a new life. I thought I did, but after moving, I gained weight and developed sleep apnea. It went on a long time before I realized that, or even knew what it was. Sleep apnea is a disease where the throat and upper airway close up during sleep and obstruct breathing. This event may not wake you, but it lightens or interrupts your sleep to start you breathing again. This process can disrupt your sleep so that, no matter how long you sleep, you never get rested. You are always sleep deprived, even though it may seem you sleep too much. Even a single night of sleeplessness will make most people sleepy, groggy, and irritable the next day. People with sleep apnea go on this way for years! Often they are forced to nap during the day. Still they feel tired. Sleep apnea is estimated to affect perhaps 10% of the adult population. Besides daytime sleepiness, it can cause choking spells at night, trouble getting going in the morning, morning headaches, poor concentration and memory, mood swings, auto accidents, obesity, high blood pressure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart attacks, strokes and still other complications. It can be fatal. Once diagnosed, it is usually treated with good success by a device called a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machine, which requires you to wear a mask connected to a hose while asleep. The machine forces air into your lungs and keeps your airway open. It isn’t painful, though some people have trouble adjusting to it. It works most of the time to reverse the symptoms of sleep apnea within weeks. Yet sleep apnea goes undiagnosed and untreated in 80-90% of the millions of sufferers in this country, mostly because of lack of awareness on the part of both patients and doctors. Doctors are notoriously undereducated on the subject of sleep medicine. If you doubt any of this, you can check it out at many, many sites on the Internet. Here is just one: SleepNet; its links will lead you to many others. Like most people with sleep apnea, I went for years without suspecting I had it. All I knew was that I had a bit of trouble sleeping at night and got very sleepy during the day. I started dozing off while working, at least on slow nights, and eventually even while driving. People noticed my napping at work. One day my agent called. He said I needed to go to the Physicians Recovery Network. This is a type of agency, present in most states, that deals with impaired doctors almost all alcoholic or drug addicted. I went without any idea what I would be facing. Once upon a time I drank too much. I was frank about that, though I hadn’t done it since I moved to Florida almost 10 years ago. I had never taken narcotics in my life. Of course, no one in this drug and alcohol oriented program believed me; they thought I was just in denial. What happened next was an incredible cascade of events, the sort of story you hear about on 60 Minutes. I found myself going first to the Rush Behavior Center in Chicago, then to the Talbott-Marsh Treatment center in Atlanta, a center for drug and alcohol rehabilitation, especially of professionals. I went where they told me under threat of losing my license. At Talbott they said they couldn’t help me and told me to go (under escort) to Menninger’s in Kansas for longer-term care, that sounded like emprisonment! By that point my wife was hospitalized; I declined to go on to Kansas. My refusal to keep following their orders has probably lost me my livelihood. How do you prove to someone that you don’t abuse alcohol or drugs? Your efforts just prove to them you are even more a hardened addict. They are used to discounting patients’ protests as denial. They won’t believe your wife because, being undoubtedly codependent, she is suspect as well and would lie to protect you. I managed to get a hair test done for drugs, which of course was negative, but convinced no one. I begged for a lie detector test but they just ignored that. I felt like the character in KafkaÕs The Trial, hopelessly lost in a system without any regard for the individual. The “authorities“ had a harder time explaining why my former employer supported my position, even though their investigator used veiled threats of audit against him. Maybe they thought we were in cahoots, running a big drug racket out his little store! After making that misstep, they declined to contact any of the many family, neighbors, and coworkers who could not believe this was happening to me. One inconvenient obstacle to their case, my employer’s story, meant that three more people had to interrogate me. The “big doctor“ told me that, wherever I had worked, there seemed to be some missing drugs. This shocked and astonished me. Even after surgery, I had declined to take narcotic painkillers that were prescribed me. All I can suppose is that, as in most places, records have mistakes entered in them now and then; or maybe people manage to steal drugs everywhere, despite all the controls. I know I wasn’t one of them. I would like to know how often drugs were missing in local pharmacies I never entered! In fact, they didn’t seem to need real evidence; they concluded I was substance dependent on the basis of my personality! With foolish openness, I had admitted that sometimes people I worked with thought me abrasive. I wish they would wait to find someone without personality flaws to start throwing stones; perhaps such a person would at least give me a fair hearing! What about the sleep study that confirmed I had severe obstructive sleep apnea causing my sleepiness and poor concentration? What about the Continuous Positive Air Pressure (CPAP) treatment that had given me immediate and dramatic relief, as it does for most sleep apneics? This seems to have no relevance to them. I’m not sure they credit what I’m saying about it. Frankly, I wonder how much any of these addiction doctors understand sleep apnea and its treatment. All they seem to understand is substance abuse; they use that diagnosis on anyone sent to them as having problems. You are presumed guilty before you even come to trial, and everything you say in your own defense is held against you. It all counts only as more proof of your constant lies!

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