Let's go back 10 years.

10 years ago or so I'm doing max effort good mornings and basically blow out both of my eardrums. From that I end up with sweat collecting behind my ear. A few weeks later I'm getting tubes put into both of my eardrums.

Why does this matter? Ever since then I've been prone to ear infections and produce a tremendous amount of earwax which will push against the eardrums. I'm supposed to get my ears professionally cleaned twice a year every year. As pretty much anybody else, I haven't been doing that the way I should be doing that. I found that just use a mix of hydrogen peroxide and water, and putting the drops in my ears once a month or so has been able to keep everything fine.

Couple weeks ago, when I was on vacation, between the humidity, the cruise boat, we had a couple rough days the way it was moving and the water, my ears clogged up.

When I get home I start the peroxide protocol to try to get the ears to unclog. After a few days I'm not having any success. I start to look to find my doctor to make an appointment. By doctor I mean my ear doctor, the specialist. I don't go to my general practitioner for this anymore because I need somebody that can go in and either use their little clipper thing and pull the crap out or vacuum it out. The ear wash stuff doesn't do shit for me.

On standby

I finally find him. He moved practices and everything else. Get an appointment on Tuesday. It's not even an appointment. It's on standby. I'm in his office for an hour answering emails with my laptop. They pull me back into the back offices to be able to wait. Anytime, if you don't know this, anytime you get stuck in a very back office, the very last one on the row in the corner, that doesn't mean he's going to be right in to see you. You're going to be in there for a while, especially if your appointment is on standby.

I'm in the office. It's like a dentist chair. It's comfortable. I'm in the office for what seems to be three to five minutes. The doctor comes in, kind of kicks the chair, startled me. I wake up I suppose and asks me what happened and proceeds to clean my ears out. My one ear still has an infection in it, so there was a prescription. The ear that is still screwed up but it's not as bad.

He sits down and he asked me if I snore. My reply to that was I'm not really sure but my wife says I do. I pretty much I do but I've been trying to avoid this whole sleep study thing for years. I've seen everybody I've trained with have to wear one of them stupid ass masks and carry a CPAP around everywhere they go. I didn't want to do that.

I'll be straight out honest and say I purposely never did anything to train my neck because I knew part of the reason why all these guys needed these fucking machines is because their neck gets so thick that the muscle is pushing down and it chokes them out while they're sleeping at night. So I didn't train my neck EVER!

See, I always had a small neck and NEVER feel asleep during the day.  I JUST happened to find the picture and now see just how screwed up my memory really is.

I've done everything possible to avoid having to have a CPAP. When he asked me if I snore and I sort of deny it because I don't want to deal with this sleep study. His reply was I have 17 patients all down the hall that can attest to the fact that you do snore and it's really bad. You stop and then you start coughing, then you'll start snoring again. He proceeds to ask me how many times a night I wake up to go to the bathroom, which is four or five times a night.

He asks if I ever throw up in my sleep, which is pretty much every night. But I told him about once a week or so. He's looking in my nose and throat and seeing if I'm lying. I'm realizing that I am now seeing an ear, nose and throat specialist. Not just your doctor, as I'm putting one and one together here.

Not this kind of vomit

He tells me that he highly recommends I get the sleep study done. Tells me that maybe it's just a matter of cutting my tonsils out. Maybe it's just drilling a hole between my nostrils or whatever the hell they do with that. Or multiple other things that they don't know until they actually do the sleep study.

I'm not so excited about this. He goes on to tell me that my symptoms of waking up to go to the bathroom five or six times a night, isn't me waking up to go to the bathroom. It's me waking up because I'm basically choking myself out. The vomiting is the same thing. This is actually a really dangerous thing. I know , I know, I have read all the same articles we have on our very own site.

Still not excited about the whole thing. I've been seeing this doctor for several years. More than several years now. The last thing he says to me is,

"Dave. Would you rather die in your bed, choking on your own vomit or in the weight room".

My reply was, "Let's do the sleep study".

There is your Dave  story of the week, which I guess you can call my life is your entertainment. To make matters even more interesting, Eric Maroscher  just wrote another article for elitefts.com about how great his CPAP has been.

I read the article again this morning. Now I'm pretty fucking excited about it. He put on 22 pounds of lean body mass the first year of using it. It's like the most ultimate recovery tool ever made. We'll see and I will keep you informed.

I don't want to sleep with a bunch of wires stuck up to my head. I don't want to sleep with a fucking mask on. I don't want to do all these other things. Now I'm really starting to wonder based upon reading what he wrote in his article, kind of what the future will hold with the results of this study is, did I hurt the gains that I could've made over the past 10 years just because I didn't want to have to wear a CPAP?

Have I had sleep apnea this whole entire time?

The take away

The takeaway from this is jump on this shit right away instead of waiting 10 years or more to find out. It could be hurting your own progress. Maybe...

Then again, once this is done they maybe just give me a mouth piece and tell me to go away... but I highly doubt that.