Posted by biam2009 on March 12, 2009 at 08:40:17:Hi All
I had a MMA 3 weeks ago which went really well. I decided to do another blog, inspired but several of you and the very good blogs you did on MMA that gave the patient perspective which helps a lot. I anyway decided to do another blog, to keep me busy ;-), to keep my friends and family up to date and to provide yet another experience to the community. Being French but leaving in California, I decided to do it bilingual so I could share also my experience in France where MMA is rarely done for sleep apnea. Some of the reasons seems to be cost related, different believe (MMA makes sense only for some special cases) and more I have not yet completely figure out...
As part of this blog, I wanted to explain what the surgery is about and why it helps. I found some interesting video on youtube that I posted in a page of my blog: http://biam2009.wordpress.com/the-surgery/. These videos are not showing the latest techniques used (according to my surgeon), but the principles are the same. You will also see in this page, different x-ray of me before the surgery and you will be able to notice significant difference in the airway size, depending on the doctor office who took the x-ray... The head position is very significant.
I feel sleep disorders are complex and are very specific to each other. You really have to work with the doctors and the community (like sleepnet), to identify what resonate with your case and to positively challenge the doctors (and your believe), to sometime get more than the out of the box answers... You can look at my historic page: http://biam2009.wordpress.com/historic and see that I had some doctors appointment that lasted 1 hour and 30 minutes (instead of 30 minutes) because the standard answer did not meet my expectation and did not match the data I collected.
I don't know yet if the MMA will cure all my issues, but after 3 week, my sleep is pretty good, it is as good or better than before, when I was using the CPAP and the dental appliance! I wake up only once or twice per night and fall back asleep pretty quickly. I think it is good, since I still have the arch bars, and feel some pain from time to time.
BTW, I found a French website also available in English that I feel provide complementary perspective on sleep disorder. It is in my link page on my blog but I am posting it here too: http://sommeil-mg.net/spip/-Welcome-
Hope this help and again thank you to all of you for sharing your experience with the community