Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.

• Job 12:10

The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.

• Job 33:4

CPAP – Continuous Pressure Airway Pressure.  It is used by people who have sleep apnea.  I have watched my wife sleeping while on a heart monitor in the hospital, before she passed away.  When she stopped snoring, and everything got extremely quiet, her pulse-oxygen plummeted drastically, but the technicians said that she did not have sleep apnea.  And when the alarms went off, the nurse did not run into the room either.  But that is why sleep apnea is dangerous.

But while my wife never got a CPAP, I have had one for over 10 years.  At this point, I have difficulty sleeping without it, but the machine and the leaks wake me up at night.

When I was in the hospital, using my CPAP, the nurses said they saw it “all.” In that you would not believe how a CPAP user gets the CPAP to stop leaking in the middle of the night.

Okay, take a few steps backward.  The CPAP mask may not leak when you go to sleep, but then you shift in the bed.  That can knock the mask off.  With me, I have extremely dry skin and a face that does not work with any mask that has ever been made.  So, when the skin dries, I have one of two things that wake me up.  1) Cold air blows against my eyes.  That wakes you up in a hurry. Or 2) The air leaks around the seal, making fart noises, very loud fart noises.  Like an entire company of cowboys who have eaten nothing but beans for the past month kind of fart noises.

Okay, so the CPAP wakes you up.  The device that helps you sleep wakes you up.

So, I take a low dose of Melatonin and I can easily go back to sleep, even without going to the bathroom – something my urologist cannot imagine.  But I have to stop the leak.  I used to roll onto my stomach and do a face plant into the pillow.  The weight of my head pushes the mask against my face and the seal no longer leaks.  Since I have been having a tech neck problem (think really bad crick in the neck that never goes away), I have had to sleep on my back lately.  So, I put a pillow over the mask, a heavy one, and then put the covers over the pillow to hold it in place.

If you do not have a CPAP, and thus a steady flow of air to your nose and/or mouth, I would not suggest doing either of these things.  You would suffocate.  But without the CPAP, why would you think of doing them?  The CPAP gets the air to the mask even with the pillow covering your face.

But I have noticed my pillow being hot lately when I wake up.  I mean, hot to the touch, much hotter than a simple normal body temperature.  So, have I been ill?

As it turns out, it took me a while to figure out the heat transfer issue.  Odd, I have a masters degree and most of the graduate level work was in heat transfer and fluid flow.  Everything going on with the pillow thing and my brain did not register.

One of the ways that the body regulates a normal healthy body temperature is that the skin loses heat.  When the skin cannot lose heat fast enough, we sweat.  But we forget that as we exhale, the gases that leave our lungs are warm and moisture laden.  The CPAP mask has a flapper valve so that the gases that we exhale do not go back into the device.  They are exhaled right at the mask.  Right into the covers that you are buried beneath.  Right into the pillow over your face.  The covers and pillow absorb the moisture (water) and the hot gases, which eventually filter into the air.  And if you have a comforter over your body (preventing the body from losing a lot of heat), it will be the comforter over the pillow which is over the CPAP in keeping it from leaking.

So, do not be alarmed if you wake up and the covers feel hot, the pillow feels hot, and then you check your temperature with one of those thermometers that reads your forehead temperature and it says you are running a couple of tenths of a degree above normal.

You are not sick.  The heat just had nowhere to go.  For one thing, eat earlier in the evening, but that helps very little.  Use a lightweight blanket or bedspread.  Again not a lot of help.  Or just realize that the heat that your body would have lost naturally while you slept is being trapped in the bed linens.  You might want to launder them more often.

And as for the carbon dioxide that you exhale.  That would partially get trapped in the pillow.  By the next evening, you should be fine.  I have no evidence that I am dain bramaged.  None at al.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.