by Sue Roberts
When her husband developed sleep apnea, Sue endured a lot of sleepless nights due to his snoring. In the year since he began oral appliance therapy, both Sue and her husband are finally getting their rest.
This blog post was written for the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine, the only national non-profit professional society dedicated exclusively to the practice of dental sleep medicine, and is published here with their permission. The AADSM represents thousands of dentists across the U.S. who are specially trained to provide snoring and sleep apnea solutions.
As a mother of three daughters, it’s safe to say I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights, especially when all three were teenagers at the same time. But when the last one left the house, I (wrongly) assumed that meant I’d be getting eight blissful hours of uninterrupted sleep each night. A woman can dream, right?
Except I rarely had the chance to dream, because around that time my husband Jon developed sleep apnea and began snoring loudly. This was in the late 1990s; we’d been married roughly 25 years at the time, and neither of us had ever heard of oral appliance therapy. Even the term “sleep apnea” wasn’t mainstream then, and we certainly weren’t aware of the health risks associated with it. We simply shrugged our shoulders and figured Jon was just a loud snorer. So we learned to live with it.
Sometimes I wore ear plugs at night, and I’d often try to go to bed before him, hoping to fall into a deep enough sleep that his snoring wouldn’t wake me. When it did, I’d nudge him with my elbow or foot and instruct him to roll onto his side—the sleeping position that seemed to best muffle his snoring. We did this toss-turn-elbow-kick-sigh dance for the next 25 years of our marriage. And eventually I added in another move: sleeping in a guest bedroom when his snoring became too loud to bear.
But it wasn’t until one of our daughters came for a visit and ,after one night, jokingly said she wanted to check into a hotel. She had slept in a guest room in the basement, directly below our bedroom. In the morning, I casually asked if she slept well and she said, “No. It was like trying to sleep with a freight train running through the bedroom!” Then she asked me how I could possibly sleep through the night given her dad’s loud snoring. That’s when I realized I hadn’t been sleeping through the night, I’d been restlessly lying in bed through the night, catching briefer and briefer batches of actual sleep. All the adapting simply wasn’t normal or sustainable.
Shortly after our daughter’s visit, I made Jon an appointment with his primary care physician, hoping for some guidance. She prescribed a sleep apnea test he could take at home.
After just one night, the results were shared with his primary care physician along with specialists at a sleep lab, who confirmed Jon had sleep apnea—which worried me a great deal. Mostly because I automatically assumed he’d need to use a CPAP machine at night, and I had read they were often as loud as the snoring itself. I also knew it was unlikely my husband would tolerate wearing a mask over his face at night. We were both relieved when his doctor said he was a good candidate for oral appliance therapy and went on to explain that a small, noiseless, mouthguard-like device could be worn at night to alleviate his symptoms. No CPAP necessary.
From there, his primary care physician referred him to a dentist who was a Qualified Dentist through the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine.
A few days later, Jon was in the dentist’s office. The dentist explained he was specially trained in oral appliance therapy and would work with Jon to develop a treatment plan and custom-fit a device. The dentist took an impression of his mouth and sent the mold off to a lab. Jon went back a few weeks later to collect his device. The dentist made minor adjustments at that time to ensure the best fit. The results were immediate. After the first night, we both remarked how rested we felt.
It’s now been just over a year since Jon found lasting, comfortable relief with his oral appliance, and I have never slept better.
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