The Forums › Forums › Tools, Techniques & Treatments › Time Management › desperate to managing my sleep cycle. any one want to join? › Re: desperate to managing my sleep cycle. any one want to join?
Anonymous
Thanks, sugargremlin. The sleep log is very useful, I have been keeping a log in a little coiled notebook which means I have to transfer it somewhere else, this one is very handy! I gave one to my husband too.
Yes, write something out, sleep on it (ha ha – sorry!) and then tweak it. You may find you remember more each time you go back to the document. Ask family & friends to give you feedback on their recollections too. My dad remembers me as being “very active” as a child, narcolepsy children are like that, apparently. You can always give a copy to the sleep doc. Make a copy of your sleep log to give him too.
If it’s like my appointment with the sleep doc, I had to fill out a 25 page questionnaire before going there, and the doc reviewed it and also asked me questions, some of which he followed a bit further. He was very methodical, wrote all of my responses down, and I really felt for the first time in my life that a medical professional understood my sleep problems.
Have a look at the most common disorders (you can go nuts looking at too many variations) and evaluate whether or not the markers apply to you. If I’d gone to another sleep doc, they might have diagnosed insomnia and sent me away, but I met some of the other criteria for narcolepsy, even thought the cataplexy was non-existent (or very subtle). A very fragmented night’s sleep is a marker for narcolepsy according to him. So you can do a bit of the work for the sleep doc in self-assessing before you get there. I am terrible in responding to questions on the fly, my memory was so bad I wouldn’t recall a relevant incident, so unless the RIGHT question was asked, or I’d written it down, I wouldn’t have offered it. Thank goodness these people give us so much time, a GP would have you out the door with sleep meds without a proper diagnosis.
Memory and focus are really so much better now. My husband talks to me and I actually pay attention to him and understand what he’s talking about (unless he gets too technical).
$1400 sounds like a lot of $, but if you can come up with it, it’s worth it in the long run if it means you get a proper diagnosis. I am so grateful that I was finally diagnosed. I didn’t have to pay for my sleep study but I did pay for my ADD assessment, it was well worth it because it finally uncovered what’s been going on my whole life. Divide that sum by the number of days you expect to live and it’s less than a cup of coffee a day. What would you trade for a better quality of life? Even if you sleep badly at the clinic, it’s still data to support a diagnosis. So think about it again.
Totally crazy – I got home yesterday and the local hospital had sent a letter stating that I have a sleep study booked for Nov 26th, and that since I’ve had a diagnostic study once before in my life (20 years ago), I am required to have a consultation beforehand. The head of the sleep clinic would be meeting with me for FIFTEEN MEASLY MINUTES before my study. He’s the same respirologist who said I didn’t have asthma (I do). Soooooo glad I found the clinic in Toronto and am through the process now. Anyway, the hospital will charge me $400 if the study is not covered by OHIP (provincial government insurance plan) so I need to call and make sure they take me off their list. Would a respirologist diagnose differently than a psychiatrist specifically trained in sleep disorders? Hmmm – not going to find out!
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