Battling for breath and a good night’s sleep
As Randy Darnall climbs into the soft bed with plain white sheets and pale comforter, he sports a ponytail of sorts, freshly sprouted from his short-cropped hair. And for the first time in many a night, he claims a double bed all to himself.
The ponytail is not hair, but a slew of bundled wires connected to 20-plus electrodes placed all over his body to measure statistics such as brain waves, breathing effort, blood oxygen saturation, heart rate and snoring. And the bed is empty because Darnall is not at his home in Highland, Michigan — he is spending the night at the U-M Sleep Disorders Laboratory in the KMS Building on South State Street.
Darnall suffers from sleep apnea, a condition which causes him to stop breathing in his sleep for 10 seconds or more, and can awaken him 50 times per hour. The 42-year-old father of four has come to the University of Michigan to take part in a study he hopes will identify solutions to help him sleep better at night.
His wife, Colleen, was the impetus for Darnall’s trip to the lab. His condition has worsened such that he gets only four hours of sleep per night. Between that and his almost-constant snoring, Colleen urged her husband to see a specialist.
“She has seen me stop breathing for a minute and a half,” Darnall says. “She sits there wondering if I am going to breathe again.” The apnea leaves him understandably fatigued during the day. “When I wake up, I feel like I did not sleep,” he says. “I find myself sluggish all the time, but just figure, hey, I’m getting old.”
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| Garnett Hegeman attends to Randy Darnall in the sleep lab Photo: Kevin Bergquist |
Darnall assumes the episodes wake him, but he is not sure. This is common, according to Garnett Hegeman, a supervising technologist at the lab. He has worked in sleep medicine for more than 20 years and has seen thousands of patients with sleep apnea.
“At night, while asleep, you really are not aware of what is happening to you,” Hegeman says. “You may think you are sleeping fine, but then you wake up not feeling rested. Some patients say, ‘I slept eight hours, why do I feel so bad?’” If it is sleep apnea, they may be unaware of hundreds of brief arousals they have had during the night, he says.
After hooking up Darnall to machines that monitor his movements and vital signs, Hegeman is confident the lab is tracking a classic case of sleep apnea. Hegeman should know, as he has had the same plight for several years.
“Have a good night,” Hegeman says at 10:15 p.m. as he shuts off the light and closes the door to one of the lab’s nine sleep rooms.
Darnall falls asleep at 10:40 p.m., and it is not long before episodes of apnea halt his breathing and, for the next seven hours, put him in and out of wakefulness, even though he may not realize it. His night is documented on a computer that constantly records 18 measurements. The output is equal to 800-plus pages of data, which are sent to a U-M physician for interpretation.
A few hours into the study, perspiration causes several of the electrodes to slip, so Martha Mock, a polysomnography technician who will watch Darnall throughout the night, slips into his room with a fan to cool him down.
Darnall climbs out of bed at 5:30 a.m. and drives back to Grand Rapids for training for his job. He will return to the clinic in two weeks to be tested on CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure), which increases air pressure in the throat, keeping tissues in his airway from collapsing when he breathes.
The technologists will re-create his ponytail of wires and electrodes, and he will climb back into bed at the lab to begin his treatment. “He is likely to see a big difference,” Hegeman says. “It’s like night and day.”
Adds Darnall, “I hope so, because I just want it fixed.”
—Kevin Bergquist
