I didn’t sleep for two years.
Not really. I went to bed and I woke up, but nothing happened in between. I drifted through days like a ghost, the world muffled and gray. I fell asleep in meetings, sometimes mid-sentence while I was the one talking. I couldn’t drive more than a few miles without catching myself nodding off. My focus was gone; my attention span, shredded.
And then there were the humiliations no one warns you about. I started losing control of my bladder. I tried every remedy, ordered boxes of adult diapers, and wondered if this was it, if I had somehow grown old overnight. My energy disappeared. My body felt swollen, my pulse pounded in my ears, my head throbbed every morning. I’d wake up with my tongue dry as sandpaper and my chest tight, as if I’d run a race in my sleep. Words escaped me, memories slipped away. I could almost feel myself unraveling.
When I finally went in for a sleep study, they told me I was having over a hundred apnea incidents an hour. One hundred. My brain was waking up every thirty seconds to save my life, and I didn’t even know it.
The Science of Slow Suffocation
Sleep apnea isn’t just snoring or “bad sleep.” It’s a full-body crisis that happens in silence. Every time your airway collapses or your brain forgets to breathe, oxygen drops and carbon dioxide builds up. Your heart panics. Your body floods itself with adrenaline and cortisol to kickstart the lungs. Then, just as you drift back into sleep, it happens again — over and over, hundreds of times a night.
When that cycle repeats for years, it doesn’t just make you tired. It breaks you down.
The pounding pulse and headaches? That’s your blood pressure surging from constant fight-or-flight activation. Swelling in the legs (and in my case, hands) is a sign your heart’s under strain, the right side working overtime to push blood through oxygen-starved lungs. Each apnea episode dumps stress hormones into your system, so your body never truly rests.
Shortness of breath follows because your lungs can’t keep up with the repeated shocks. The frequent infections I was experiencing, the pneumonia, sinus problems, constant sore throat, were collateral damage from that same nightly trauma: dry, inflamed airways that never get a break.
Memory loss and word-finding issues come from a starved brain. Chronic low oxygen and fragmented sleep literally shrink parts of the hippocampus and frontal lobes, the regions that govern memory, focus, and decision-making. Over time, you start to feel stupid, but it’s not stupidity; it’s neurological damage.
Even the bladder problems have a reason. When oxygen plummets, the heart releases a hormone called atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) that makes you dump water and sodium; it's a biochemical SOS signal usually released due to heart failure. It’s why people with untreated apnea often wake up to use the bathroom multiple times a night, or worse, lose control altogether.
And while your mind’s running on fumes, your metabolism’s on fire. Deprived sleep scrambles hunger hormones and insulin response, pushing weight up even as your energy vanishes. The longer it goes untreated, the higher the risks climb for stroke, heart attack, dementia, and sudden cardiac death.
What looks from the outside like laziness, aging, or depression is really the slow suffocation of the body.
The Miracle Cure Straight from Hell
The good news: all of this is completely reversible with the miracle cure straight from hell: the CPAP, or its bossier cousin, the BiPAP.
There’s nothing graceful or fun about it. You strap a mask to your face, tether yourself to a humming machine, and let it shove air down your throat all night. If you’re sick, like I was with pneumonia when I started, it feels like punishment. You fight every instinct that screams get this thing off me. But once you push through that barrier, once you stop fighting the air and start trusting it, the difference is staggering.
The newer machines are surprisingly quiet provided you get the seal right, which is its own fun little game. And the first night it worked, I slept six and a half uninterrupted hours. When I woke, it was like being resurrected. My head was clear. My body wasn’t heavy. The world had edges and color again. The fog was just gone.
Within days, my energy started returning. I could think, focus, write, and actually finish a thought. I wasn’t falling asleep mid-conversation or terrified of drifting off at the wheel. The brain fog lifted, the pounding pulse settled, and even my color changed; my editors said I finally looked alive again.
Then came the unexpected blessings. I didn’t diet or count calories; I just started sleeping. Over seven months, I lost thirty pounds. My blood pressure stabilized. My breathing eased. The pneumonia stopped coming back. And the most humiliating symptom of all — the incontinence that had me buying boxes of adult diapers — vanished within a week.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that CPAP gave me my life back. What I thought was aging turned out to be asphyxiation. What I thought was decline was simply deprivation. The cure may look absurd — a mask, a hose, a steady hum in the dark — but it’s oxygen, it’s rest, it’s life itself.
Awake
It’s humbling, realizing how close I came to the edge without knowing it. I’d spent years drifting through half-life, thinking I was just tired or getting older, never realizing I was starving for air. When the fog lifted, I saw what I’d been missing — not just rest, but presence.
Real sleep does more than restore the body; it restores the soul. It brings back the patience, the curiosity, the joy that exhaustion quietly steals. The world sharpens. Colors return. Thoughts have weight again. I found myself laughing more, thinking faster, and feeling grateful for the smallest things: the morning light, a clear breath, a mind that works.
Every night when I fasten that mask, I still mutter a few choice words about the noise and the straps and the ridiculousness of it all. But then I remember what it gave me. The machine may look like a punishment, but for me, it’s grace disguised as plastic and pressure. It’s the difference between existing and living, between being lost in the dark and finally, mercifully, awake.
If you’ve noticed the same symptoms creeping into your own life, if you’ve caught yourself saying, “I guess I’m just getting old,” stop and ask whether you’re really resting. As many as 80% of adults with moderate to severe sleep apnea go undiagnosed, and the odds rise with age. It’s one of the most common and most overlooked health crises in America. And it doesn’t just decrease your quality of life. It can kill you.
Talk to your doctor about a sleep study. Yes, it’s inconvenient spending a night in a lab that feels like the worst parts of a hotel room and a hospital room combined, with strangers watching you breathe. But it may go down as one of the best things you ever do.
