What is OSA?

The following is an attempt at defining Obstructive Sleep Apnoea, in lay-man’s terms, without medical jargon, that anyone can understand. It may sound fanciful, but, believe me, there are thousands of people, twice as many men as women, up and down the country who will be forever thankful that their Sleep Apnoea was diagnosed and treated, allowing them to lead a perfectly normal, healthy life. Sleep Apnoea can strike anyone, but those who drive for a living are marked as special cases, for reasons you will have already discovered.

Sleep Apnoea takes a couple of different forms, but by far the most prevalent, and the one we are concerned with here, is Obstructive Sleep Apnoea: defined as ‘a failure to draw breath because of an obstruction’, here we will refer to it as OSA.

Of course, it is not only truck-drivers who suffer from OSA: if you are in the habit of dropping off to sleep at your desk in the afternoon, there’s no harm done. You might face the wrath of your boss if it happens too regularly, and a colleague may give you a nudge to wake you, but that is nothing compared to driving a 40-tonne artic., alone in the cab, in a built-up area or hurtling down the motorway, and dropping off to sleep.

On a long, monotonous motorway journey you find yourself struggling to stay awake: you turn the radio or CD-player up loud, you sing along to the music. You open the windows to get some fresh air, but it’s all in vain: you fall asleep, you can’t help it, you have OSA.

These are known as ‘micro-sleeps’, lasting no longer than 10-20 seconds; but in 15 seconds, travelling at 60mph, you cover a quarter of a mile. You know how the traffic on a motorway can change completely in that space of time. And when you ‘awake’, you are gripped by terror at the thought of what might have happened.

You perhaps know of people who are heavy snorers; you are probably a snorer yourself. In fact, snoring loudly is the most common symptom of OSA; and it is often by keeping your bed-partner awake with the noise of snoring that the disorder is recognised in the first place. A man with a shirt-collar size of 17″ or over, probably over-weight, drinks alcohol in moderation and consumes the average fare offered by transport cafes and MSAs is a likely candidate for OSA, but not exclusively.

An OSA-sufferer never gets a decent night’s sleep, and he certainly never dreams. He wakes in the morning with a dreadful headache, as though his brain has turned to stone.  He doesn’t know it, but he has had his sleep disturbed, and subconsciously ‘woken-up’, perhaps as many as 300 times during an average night’s sleep. He has probably slept for periods of no longer than a minute and a half throughout the night. Yet he is totally unaware of ‘waking-up’.

Because he has to endure this every night, his waking-life is of very poor quality indeed. He becomes bad-tempered and irritable to his family, friends and work-colleagues, his work suffers, he takes no pleasure in socialising and, of course, he finds it difficult to stay awake.  More than anything, he wants to do nothing but sleep, and he has little choice in where or when he sleeps.  A fifteen-minute nap during the day-time would be only a short-term fix .

The OSA-sufferer has, like everybody else, an accumulation of muscles around the wind-pipe at the back of the throat. During sleep, the muscles relax and become floppy; but for the man fitting the physical description we have already seen, the weight/volume of the muscles obscures the wind-pipe, in effect preventing air getting into his lungs.

The snoring noise you hear is the air trying to make its way down the wind-pipe to the lungs, passing the obstacles (floppy muscle) in the way.  You may hear a snorer go quiet for a few seconds and then suddenly ‘gag’ and give a loud snore, as though he has moved up a gear. This happens when the obstruction becomes so acute that the air cannot pass and he stops breathing: his brain will alert him that something is wrong and he starts to breathe again.  He goes back to sleep, only for the same thing to happen a couple of minutes later and over and over again throughout the night.  He wakes up wondering how ever he is going to face the day ahead.

Totally unaware of what has been happening to him throughout the night, it is often the bed-partner who first provides the clue to there being something wrong. She will say “Do you know you stopped breathing while you were asleep?  I gave you a poke in the ribs and you started breathing again.”

You begin to put two and two together: you feel dreadfully tired during the day, you find yourself struggling to stay awake while you’re driving, you wake every morning with a banging headache, your social-life has disintegrated and now, your wife is saying you stop breathing while you’re asleep.

These are the classic symptoms of OSA; it is an illness that can be treated very effectively, and provided you follow the treatment regime, you will find yourself living a full and happy life.