Posted by ejy2 on April 02, 2010 at 10:03:36:First of all, thank to all of you who have provided support through your blogs and phone calls (Roger, cupertinojoe, Shelby, Pinski...) This is my first substantial report on my status 8 months after MMA surgery at Stanford. Hopefully it will be helpful to others, and also I would welcome hearing from people who have had similar experiences, have some advice, words of encouragement, etc.
In a nutshell, my surgery was helpful but I am rather far from fully recovered. Going in, I had almost no REM sleep and an RDI of 16. Pre-surgery and without CPAP, I became largely dysfunctional during the day. My head hurt, my brain was completely fuzzy, my shoulders and neck ached, I could not focus. After surgery, I feel better without CPAP, but I am still quite tired. Since my work involves a lot of original writing, this is particularly taxing for me.
In the 2 months after surgery, my sleep quality seemed to go up and down. At its best point, I was sleeping maybe 5 hours straight, and then for a period of about 3 hours afterward I would wake up frequently. During those times, I was not 100%, but I felt refreshed. I didn't feel my heart beating fast after wake ups; lying in bed felt relaxing, while before I often felt agitated. Best of all, I felt my "old self" returning -- I felt at least somewhat inspired to read books, work, write, brainstorm, rather than just veg out on the couch. Nowadays, though, my sleep quality has slipped, so that I still feel pretty tired during the day. I wake up more often and have that "agitated" feeling at night. I do not feel absolutely devastated as in the pre-surgery days, so I am very glad I did the surgery, but it definitely impairs my work and makes me rather irritable and anti-social.
I have a strong sense that elevating myself on a wedge significantly helps my sleep quality (pretty steep, maybe 50 degrees), although I am still testing this out. This also may explain why my sleep quality was quite good a couple weeks after the surgery and then declined -- during that same period, I slept and rested in an upright position, and jaw pain and congestion allowing, I slowly became flatter and flatter.
Roger and others have been giving me a lot of encouragement and have noted that it is too early to tell, that I should stick it out, and so on. This all makes good sense. Of course, as I am sure many of you can relate to, I do feel a bit disappointed, as I was hoping to find a magic pill to my long-time suffering, and it looks like I may have to wait a bit longer, do follow-up soft tissue work, etc. My doctor tells me I'll do a sleep study 2 months from now.
I would enjoy hearing from people who had all kinds of post-MMA experiences, particularly those who had somewhat volatile, up-and-down ones like mine or ones that involved a slow upward curve towards full wakefulness; any advice or general thoughts would be appreciated. Please feel free to reply and ask questions if you like too. Thanks!
- Re: 8 wks post MMA questions westernjoe 18:40 4/05/10 (0)
- Re: 8 wks post MMA questions Marie G 18:22 4/04/10 (4)
- Re: 8 wks post MMA questions ejy2 19:19 4/04/10 (3)
- Re: 8 wks post MMA questions Marie G 20:37 4/05/10 (2)
- Re: 8 wks post MMA questions ejy2 09:24 4/06/10 (1)
- Re: 8 wks post MMA questions westernjoe 11:46 4/09/10 (0)