Breathless: Diary of a Patient with Sleep Apnea

By Hilbert Haar

In December 2022 I was diagnosed with vascular dementia and it main cause: sleep apnea. IN this diary I take readers on a trip through my medical jungle towards the treatment with a CPAP (Continuous Positive Air Pressure) machine and with the blood thinner Plavix. My objective is to raise awareness about sleep apnea, a condition that is often wrongly diagnosed as burnout.
Sleep apnea interrupts the flow of oxygen to the brain and can result in mini strokes. The earlier a patient begins with the treatment of this condition, the better the chances for recovery are..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hilbert Haar
• Release date: Feb 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215506066

Hilbert Haar

Hilbert Haar (1950) started working as a journalist in the Netherlands in 1969. He has worked for newspaper and magazine publishers and also worked as an independent writer with his own company V.o.f. De Stijl. He spent seven years in Greece on the island of Crete, and lived also briefly in Utah and California. He worked as the Editor-in-Chief at Today, a muckraking English-language newspaper published in Philipsburg, St. Maarten - Dutch West Indies, for ten-plus years, until the paper closed down after Hurricane Irma in 2017. He is currently traveling with his wife Myriam in Asia.He finished his first full-length thriller - The Ultimate God Conspiracy in 2018, and published a second thriller - Diary of a Psychopath (Dutch title: Dagboek van een Psychopaat) in 2021.Het luchthartige zelf-help boek Achttien Tips Voor een Gelukkig Leven verscheen eveneens in 2021.

Book preview

Breathless

Diary of a patient with sleep apnea

Hilbert Haar

Published by Hilbert Haar at Smashwords

Copyright 2023 Hilbert Haar

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of contents

01. Introduction

02. Thursday December 29, 2022

03. Friday December 30, 2022

04. Saturday December 31, 2022

05. Monday January 2, 2023

06. Tuesday January 3, 2023

07. Wednesday January 4, 2023

08. Friday January 6, 2023

09. Saturday January 7, 2023

10. Wednesday January 11, 2023

11. Tuesday February 7, 2023

12. Wednesday February 8, 2023

13. Epilogue

14. About the author

15. From the same author

16. Contact

Introduction

I suffer from obstructive sleep apnea. The term apnea stems from the old-Greek word apnoia, which literally means: no air.

Suffering from sleep apnea is maybe a strong word, because I have never noticed anything about it. However, my wife Myriam noticed that I stopped breathing every now and then during my sleep, years ago.

A visit to a very nice neurologist in Indonesia woke me up: I have a moderate form of sleep apnea. Moderate? So it is not all that bad? That’s what the Dutch comedian and word-artist Herman Finkers would say about this.

Sit down please because I have bad news for you, the doctor said.

Finkers: I had heard that a bad-news conversation is one of the toughest parts of a doctor’s job.

So, I put him a bit at ease; I gave him a cigarette and put a package of tissues ready.

You have chronic lymphatic leukemia

I said, I don’t even know what that is.

The doctor said: it is cancer.

How weird, I said, I never have cancer.

It is blood cancer but it is mild.

O how fortunate. So, it is not going to kill me.

Yes, it is going to kill you.

But the odds for a cure are good.

No, it is incurable.

Okay, so it is incurable and it will