Got a call from the docs office today. My bloodwork was all good.
As I suspected, the doc is having me switch up to 160mg of Furosemide twice a day to see if that controls the excess water weight.
That's four times the original dosage (twice as much, twice as often), and he wants me to do another blood panel in 10 days; to make sure it's not excessively depleting anything (which is why I'm on megadoses of vitamins, and potassium supplements) and that it's not screwing up my kindey function.
He only got the sleep study results and the EKG results today and hadn't gone through them yet; but I already know from the sleep tech, I have something beyond "severe" complex sleep apnea (a mix of both obstructive and cns apnea), and hypopnea (periods of excessively short and shallow breathing with long gaps between breaths).
I am apparently experiencing apnea 40-60+ times per hour, for 10-40 seconds each episode, with as little as 10 seconds between episodes, and as much as 4 minutes. This is reducing my O2 saturation down to as low as 67%, with sats below 80% at least 40% of the time and below 70% at least 5% of the time.
94-99% O2 saturation is normal by the way.
SaO2 as low as 67% is actually into hypoxia territory, and can cause brain damage if it stays that low for prolonged periods.
The apnea is probably contributing to the blood pressure spikes, the insomnia, the weight gain and a bunch of other crap, as well as the fatigue, microsleeps, daytime sleepiness, and cognitive dysfunction (it's making me frikken stupid).
Joy.
Unfortunately, there was a problem with the monitoring equipment in the middle of the night at the sleep lab, and they couldn't test my response to PAP; so I'm going to need to do another sleep study before they can set a titration level, and give me a scrip for the damn machine.
