An Update...

Last month I brought you the story of my sleepless night at the Center for Sleep Medicine, as part of my ongoing quest to discover the cause of my constant sleepiness. Today, I met with my doctor there to discuss the results of the study. As it turned out, the test was largely inconclusive. I did have some sleep apnea events, but only at a rate of six per hour. Five or fewer is considered normal, so six would be the mildest of mild cases. The doctor felt that it was not enough to explain my levels of excessive daytime tiredness, so she would like to conduct another study, this time an evening study paired with a daytime sleep latency test the following day.

A sleep latency test consists of a series of monitored naps taken at various intervals throughout the day. It looks for how quickly one falls asleep when napping, and how quickly one enters REM sleep during a nap. This is the test for narcolepsy. I'm scheduled to have mine in mid-September, so I'll be sure to keep you posted on how it goes as well.