Return of the CPAP Machine

I am not a healthy individual. For anyone who isn't aware, since the inception of my blog I have discussed my numerous health problems like my lung cysts and sleep apnea, and those posts are from 2011. And while my lungs haven't really bothered me (much) since my fatigue has always been an issue.

I've just kind of powered through it. I had a mouth guard for a while because we thought my sleep apnea was caused by my jaw crushing my throat. But eventually I stopped using it because it was causing jaw soreness and alignment issues as well as hearing problems.

And then I started gasping awake at night.

Well this is unsettling.

It was odd. Waking up up to 3 times a night. It was then I realized that my sleep apnea was getting worse. Much worse. We had suspicions that I was unconsciously waking up at night (which explains why I was always so tired) but now I was aware of it.

Powering through wasn't working. I booked an appointment with a sleep specialist and took another kit home to see how badly I was sleeping at night.

And it was pretty bad.

In 5 hours of sleep I had apparently woke up a total of 44 times.

Now this is horrifying.

Alright, time to get back onto the CPAP machine. For those unaware, it's a little device that hooks into a tube, and the tube is connected to a mask, and the mask connects to your face. The machine pumps moist air into your face and that helps you sleep better.

If your jaw is crushing your throat, the increased air pressure will force things open. If your brain is stupid and forgets to breath, then hopefully this will stimulate breathing.

But that's assuming you can breathe to begin with. Immediately with the CPAP, I was having trouble adjusting to the mask. I was only able to wear it for an hour at a time before tearing it off my face because I was suffocating.

It took 3 weeks before we finally found a mask that worked for me. Up until now, the data collected was kind of skewed, what with 1 hour of sleep recorded. NOW we had 3 to 5 hours of sleep recorded at a time.

Yay?

And guess what we found?

My brain is stupid.

They think that in addition to the possibility that my jaw is crushing my throat, my brain ALSO forgets to breathe. For up to half a minute at a time I stop breathing at night. This would explain why I would start gasping awake in the middle of the night. Lack of oxygen will do that to you.

Scumbag brain.

LET'S ALSO HAVE WEIRD DREAMS ABOUT YOUR EX.

But we're slowing fixing things I think. The rate of my "not-breathing" has dropped to an average of only 5 times an hour.

For now.

End of Term Update 1

Again, apologies for not visiting everyone. This week has been hectic but I hope I have everything under control. At least, I've done enough of everything to maintain some semblance of control.

Honestly though, I can't afford to slack off or I'm going to die before the end of the weekend. Everyday is a daily struggle just to be on track.

Or I can just stay up all night to try and catch up. That's always fun.

Man I love Corgis.

Almost every project I have is half/almost done so I have an idea of how much work I need to shove into it to complete it on time. The exception is studying for the GRE. Does anyone remember my crazed friend Yu? I managed to grab a few study guides off of him and I'm trying to cram as much as I can for the GRE exam on Sunday.

Over 4 hours in front of a computer answering poorly worded questions to determine if I qualified to enter graduate school. Fun stuff.

Well, back to work. Never ends does it.

I am Alive

Sometimes I don't know how I manage to survive. During exam weeks I've been known to eat one meal a day and sleep 5 hours (at most) a night. It's by no means a healthy lifestyle, and I do not recommend it to anyone who wants to live past the age of 40. But it's just this habit I've fallen into and I'm too stupid engrained in it to stop.

That being said, I can return back to normal now that all my midterms have been completed.

Hahahaha, not really.

What was really bad was that I didn't start seriously studying for my Cognitive psychology midterm until 2 days beforehand. That's never a good thing to do. It adds additional stress and the chances of you remembering anything are greatly reduced.

And yet somehow I felt that that exam was the easiest midterm I've written so far. I could have very well been delusional, maybe just cocky. Sleep deprivation does strange things to a person's mind. And not eating. Ok, being unhealthy in general does bad things to your brain.

And while we're on the topic of health, something is wrong with my lung or lungs. I don't know what, but it refuses to fully recover. I'm still feeling spasms of pain, random bouts of breathlessness. I mean, it's certainly less frequent than it was 2 weeks ago but it should be back to normal by now.

I really do hope it's just due to me not taking care of myself for the last little while. And I'm only admitting this on the blog because I know Theresa has exams herself and can't take the time to read any of my posts. Otherwise she'd drag me to the nearest emergency room. By the time you read this Dear everything will be all better.

Or I'll be dead. Either or.

Good timing. It's almost Halloween.

With exams out of the way I can actually start focusing a bit on my Slenderman costume for Halloween. I ordered some stuff but it still hasn't arrived yet so I'm a bit anxious.

Ok, end of blog post. I need some sleep before I pass out in my chair again. See everyone on Monday.

Status Report

Hello hello. Again, I apologize because I think this is the longest I've gone without commenting on another blog. And at this rate I'm going to continue breaking records until midterms are done. Actually, because of one midterm but we'll get to that in a moment.

Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me so far. Much appreciated.

Online friends are the best. I love you all.

In good news, my lung has (mostly) recovered I think. Just a brief case of things being worse than normal. I honestly can't tell if poor sleeping causes my lung to collapse or the collapsing of my lung taxes my body so much that I'm more tired than usual. Or maybe it's sudden waves of stress. That can causes both so let's just blame University.

Speaking of University. Midterms are slowly being written. Social Influences and Aging psychology has been done. I'm not sure if it's me but the midterms feel harder. I'm doing alright in them but I really want to be hitting A's and A-'s to increase my chances of getting into Speech Pathology. Conservation psychology DOES NOT have a midterm which I am so grateful for.

And then.

And then we have Cognitive psychology.

Yeah... I really, really, really wish I could have crammed a different Science course into my schedule because I am getting torn apart in this class. It's not that the prof is bad, he's enthusiastic, knows the material, he even wrote the textbook and gave it to us free online. Anyone who saves me a few hundred dollars is a friend of mine.

That being said, the material is still very dense, very hard to get through, and the weekly quizzes are kicking my butt. Let alone what the midterm will do to it. It's all written, no multiple choice. The last time I was required to write anything for an exam was years ago. All that training from High School is gone. I am not looking forward to writing a short essay on comparing the theories of how the brain may comprehend and understand the world.

I guess I shouldn't have assumed that a higher level Cognitive psychology course would be similar to the lower level ones. Or maybe I've been studying for this class all wrong. I know a girl in my class who is getting by quite well just by reading the notes. I've been doing the equivalent of slamming the textbook PDFs into my eyes until something breaks.

I still have a day to try and save myself. Wish me luck, I'll see everyone Friday.

500 Followers!

Short post today. I'm only into my second week of classes and already I'm getting <5 hours a sleep a night. You'd think that I'd be able to sleep in on my days off but I've taken extra working shifts at my part time job instead so I think this means I'm busier than normal.

Anyways, details about that in future post. Recently I somehow reached the 500 follower mark. That's like half a thousand which is pretty awesome. I don't have much else to say other than if you have things you want me to do a post on, feel free to suggest it. I could always use some new ideas.

500 followers!

I usually share a few videos with these kinds of posts so to start, here's an amazing painter:

Anyone fond of MAD, The Avengers, and Adventure time?

And last, this one is only for people who play Starcraft. Otherwise it won't make much sense:

I'll have a proper post up on Sunday. See you then.

The Final Week

I'm still alive. By some stroke of luck I haven't collapsed or gone insane like some of my fellow peers but more on that later.

So, from these two posts you can tell I've had my work cut out for me. Well as I mentioned before my workload had suddenly tripled. Some of you may remember my research problems, numerous technical errors and other small problems impeding the project. Good news is that I finally fixed everything and was able to start running people through it.

The bad news was I had 4 days left until the end of the term and I still needed 15 hours worth of data to go through. This required me to stay on Campus until 8PM several times. Plus there was the day that I forgot my key, and the day that the printer stopped working. Tons of fun little disruptions.

This also stole time away from the rest of my work. And if you know anything about me, I compensate for less time, by not resting.

And babies and dead people.

But that's not all! I realized that on the same Wednesday my papers were due I had not only a presentation to prepare for, but I was also expected to lead a discussion on a paper for a seminar. Things were not looking good for me.

I am pretty good at BS'ing my way through things. It's one of my few talents. But there's a limit to how much I can pull off. And on that cold Wednesday morning, April 11th, I was staring at a computer screen and realizing I had hit that limit. There was no way I could prepare for both presentations and papers even if I pulled another all-nighter. Scrambling for a solution I began reading through syllabi, hoping for some of salvation.

And then I saw it.

Developmental Paper Due Friday April 13.

Friday 13.

Friday. 

 

This was pretty much my expression.

I had got the due date wrong, I had more time than I anticipated. And with this new information I focused on my other work. It gave me enough time to focus on my other paper and the two presentations. All in all, I thought that Wednesday went fairly well. Well, as well as a day can go when you have that many things to do and turn in.

At the moment I'm finishing up my last paper. I have everything planned out it's just a matter of putting it altogether in a coherent fashion. If I'm lucky, I might be able to go to bed soon and sneak in 2 hours of sleep before class.

But another unexpected problem popped up. Who remembers the friend that I had that probably had some form of mental problem? The guy who was possibly doing and saying a lot of things for attention seeking purposes? Well he's back and crazier than ever. And not in a good way.

Seriously dude, go back to your therapist. There's nothing I can do for you anymore.

So I walk into class, Yu comes to sit beside me and goes "Hey man, Damian look at this."

He rolls up his sleeves and all over his arms are these cuts and slashes. He's written words like FOCUS and A++++ all over his forearms. And I'm sitting there in disbelief, I mean, this is what Junior High kids do to themselves, not 4th year University students ready to graduate.

And when I ask how he's doing it, he reaches into his bag and pulls out... 

A scalpel. Like, the kind of scalpel that a surgeon would use.

And then here's where it gets even better. He starts cutting himself. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE LECTURE. 

Just. Why.

So I'm sitting there, trying to concentrate on what the prof is saying while Yu is sitting beside me, wincing in pain as he's slicing his arms up. At one point he even goes "Hey man, here you go." And dumps a chunk of skin in front of my laptop.

I tried my best to ignore him but inside I'm starting to panic a bit. I half expected him to go feral and start stabbing me. And I hope no one dares ask why I didn't try to take the scalpel away from him (which he claims came from his Anatomy class). Would you want to try and wrestle a sharp object from a potentially deranged person? No? Neither would I.

For whatever reason, he also decided to make a Facebook status update inbetween his cutting sessions. Something along the lines of "SOS, someone on campus help me please!". And well, he got his help. Some people responded and due to mutual friends I managed to get a group of people to escort Yu to some mental health clinic. I couldn't go with him, I had research stuff to do.

But what really caused me to shake my head was as Yu left, he turned to me and said:

"Yo Damian, my arms really hurt.".

GEE. I WONDER WHY.

(I cannot wait for this term to end.)

Resolutions Update 3

I still can't believe I'm following through with this. People generally stop trying or forget by this point but here I am trudging on. I deserve a gold star, a cookie, or something.

Even though I've been kind of too busy since the last update to have made much progress.

I'm giving myself a high-five anyways...

Goal #1:

Yeah... It's not easy to do push-ups when you're sleep deprived. I would know, I've tried. I'm still stuck on week 4 of the 100 push-ups challenge. I'm finding that my wrists are getting sore and that a way to get around this is to use fists instead of open palms.

The problem with this is that now the push-ups are significantly harder and my nails are digging into my palms. I guess I can alternate between the two methods until I find something better.

Oh, and I've joined up with a site called Fitocracy. Basically, you do various exercises, you get points for doing them, achievements, and level up. It works based on an honor system as no one can really prove that you've done the exercises but lying about it only hurts yourself. I find it's a good way to keep track of what you're doing and even though all I do is sporadic push-ups, it's still something.

You can follow me if you want. Just search for DWei and we can encourage each other in our bid to become more healthy.

Could be worse I guess.

Goal #2:

The job hunt has not gone well. There is virtually nothing for Psychology students. Nothing. I have looked all over and in my city, all they want are Engineers. You know it's bad when you search for "Psychology Internship" and the top results come back as "Engineer Internships".

Right now, this is the only kind of Engineer I want to see.

I've extended my search to neighboring cities and I'm even considering the Canadian Army. Apparently, if you have a degree that matters more to them and you start off better. So I've heard. I'll give more details into this as I look into it, my courses have been eating up a lot of my time.

A fellow Psychology student suggested that I look into Speech Pathology or a similar career route. All I'd be required to do is take a few more years of courses in Linguistics. I've never even considered this but I'll certainly look into it when time permits.

Also, has anyone else been getting paid significantly less from advertising? My traffic has gone up but my earnings have dwindled. Seeing as this blog is major part of my current income I'm a bit concerned.

Oh and current debt to parents is currently $5200 Canadian.

Goal #3:

Looks like I'm just really bad for finishing things. I have a project on hiatus with my friend Jean, my hollow book is almost done however, just need to make a few more cuts and I'll post pictures of the finished thing.

I've also decided to finally get my full driving license. I've had my probational one for long enough so I can take the test but I want to get more practice first. Getting the full driver's license counts for this goal as it is something I've wanted to do for a while.

And Theresa has been hinting that I should get it so I can drive her around. So yay, more encouragement. Though I won't take the test until after finals most likely.

And let's hope this doesn't happen.

Goal #4:

This is probably my worst goal so far. I've only done one book review so far and I haven't had time to finish other books or games thanks to my workload exploding. I'll probably make up for it in the future by doing two a month or something. Same applies to Goal #3.

And now I need to run off and continue studying for a midterm. I'll see you guys on Friday. A lot of people asked questions for my last post and I'll try and answer them as soon as I have a chance to properly read them all.