To my surprise, my CPAP did not solve all my problems.
My first night that I received my CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Machine used for treating Sleep Apnea) device, I was very eager to start using it, so I jumped right in! And I didn't sleep a wink... literally. Maybe it was all the success stories I'd read, or the positive personal accounts on Reddit, but I was feeling overconfident that this would be my quick fix to glorious sleep. Sadly, it wasn't. I wish this was the part of the blog where I recount how I worked with my provider, set goals, and began using the CPAP perfectly to what is now glorious sleep! The truth is, I don't use my CPAP right now. After 2 months of trying to use the CPAP nightly, I was sleeping worse than without the CPAP. Even more unfortunately, this stirred up another bout of insomnia. My eyes were opened to the side of CPAP treatment I hadn't heard about before, but I've come to find that it's not an uncommon experience.
What happens when a CPAP doesn't work? It can be easy to feel like an anomaly, someone who doesn't fit in the treatment "boxes". It can feel as though you are someone who can't be helped. The western medical world doesn't like when people don't fit in the carefully curated "boxes", and there doesn't seem to be many resources out there for the outliers.
The truth is, society is filled with outliers, people who don't fit into the "boxes". This isn't a story about how I magically healed my sleep apnea with the newest and latest secret elixir. Actually it's simply a story about how I started listening to my body, intuition, and gave myself a voice as an outlier. Here is to hoping that one day there will be a "box", just for outliers.
You deserve a voice and to be heard! Let's start your journey.
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